CNN anchor Sara Sidner wrapped up the 11 am ET hour of CNN News Central with an emotional announcement, her voice cracking several times as she shared with her viewers that she had been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer.

After coming back from the show’s final commercial break, Sidner asked viewers to “take a second to recall the names of eight women who you love and know in your life,” and then said that “statistically” one of those eight would end up getting breast cancer, and she was now “that one in eight in my friend group.”

Sidner noted that she had never been “sick a day of my life,” did not smoke, rarely drank, and had no family history of breast cancer. “And yet here I am, with stage three breast cancer.”

“It is hard to say out loud,” she acknowledged, her voice cracking. “I am in my second month of chemo treatments and will do radiation and a double mastectomy.”

While she was grateful that stage 3 breast cancer was “not a death sentence anymore for the vast majority of women,” she described how shocked she was to learn that Black women are 41% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women.

“So to all my sisters, Black and white and brown out there, please, for the love of God, get your mammograms every single year. Do your self-exams,” she urged. “Try to catch it before I did.”

Sidner ended with an emotional commentary about her feelings of hope and gratitude after her diagnosis:

Now here’s something that I could never ever have predicted would happen to me: I have thanked cancer for choosing me. I’m learning no matter what hell we go through in life that I am still madly in love with this life, and just being alive feels really different for me now. I am happier because I don’t stress about foolish little things that used to annoy me.

And now every single day that I breathe another breath I can celebrate that I am still here with you. I am here with my co-anchors, my colleagues, my family. And I can love and cry and laugh and hope and that, my dear friends, is enough.

Watch above via CNN.

The post CNN’s Sara Sidner Chokes Up While Sharing Stage 3 Breast Cancer Diagnosis In Gut-Wrenching Announcement first appeared on Mediaite.

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