Hoda Kotb was initially nervous to show off her post-mastectomy body after battling cancer.
“Months and months after my surgery, but still no one has seen my breast yet,” Kotb, 61, wrote in her new Jump and Find Joy: Embracing Change in Every Season of Life memoir, detailing an interaction with her friend’s then-80-year-old aunt, Harriet. “I told her I was nervous. Harriet immediately took my hand and said, ‘Come with me.’ She led me into a bathroom and closed the door behind us.”
She continued, “I looked at her like she was crazy. I thought, ‘Does she really think I’m going to show her my boob? No way, not happening.’ Well, before I knew it, she’d lifted up her shirt and showed me her knockers!”
Kotb revealed that Harriet had also undergone a mastectomy in a period before “doctors did any kind of reconstruction.”
Hoda Kotb Recalls Doctor Saying She Would Die If She Didn’t Do Chemo
“Pointing to her chest, she said, ‘Not so bad, right?’ She lowered her shirt and waited,” Kotb recalled. “I looked at this brave woman, took a deep breath and counted three, two, one. Then, I lifted up my shirt. Harriet looked at me, shrugged and said, ‘Not so bad.’”
Harriet subsequently asked Kotb whether removing her shirt was nerve-racking.
“Yes, it was scary! It was terrifying,” Kotb added in her book. “But, it was such a big moment. It was more than just someone seeing me naked — it was [someone] helping me get rid of the shame.”
The former Today anchor was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, choosing to undergo a mastectomy instead of receiving rounds of chemotherapy.
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“I remember after my diagnosis, I went to three other specialists. I had a mastectomy, and one doctor said, ‘You need chemo.’ One said, ‘You don’t need chemo.’ And one said, ‘You can’t make a mistake either way,’” Kotb recalled on a March episode of her
“Making Space” podcast. “One person said, ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t do it.’ I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I have chills right now thinking about it.”
Kotb decided against receiving chemo because her cancer hadn’t spread to her lymph nodes.
“[My] decision was clear,” she said. “I did not do chemotherapy, and it was right for me. … After the diagnosis and after the surgery, I literally woke up from my bed, like, in a start. And I [thought], ‘You can’t scare me.’ I was like, ‘What am I afraid of now?’”
Kotb, who was working at Dateline at the time, then felt emboldened to seek employment at Today. She left the long-running morning show earlier this year and has been cancer-free since 2007.
Jump and Find Joy: Embracing Change in Every Season of Life is on sale now.
