NCS Anchor Sara Sidner Opens Up About How ‘Cancer Changed Me for the Better’ (Exclusive)

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Key Takeaways

• NCS News Central co-anchor Sara Sidner opens up about how her work reporting from disaster zones inadvertently ready her for her stage 3 breast most cancers analysis

• Sidner says being open about even the “ugly, ungraceful” components of her journey has made it simpler for her to attach with others

• The journalist says most cancers introduced her nearer to her husband and gave her a deeper appreciation for life

Hours after getting back from a February reporting journey to Minneapolis, the place she and her crew choked on tear gas while covering unrest in the city, Sara Sidner is again residence in New York wanting surprisingly refreshed regardless of an in a single day flight and fewer than two hours sleep.

Wearing a pink scarf (a designer knock-off from a road vendor, she cheerfully divulges) and a large smile, the veteran NCS correspondent explains how the dangerous work of reporting amid violence has helped her cope along with her private wrestle with breast cancer.

“If my world is only about me, it makes me spiteful and nitpicky,” says Sidner, 53. “Other people are suffering. It’s important to realize, ‘Girl, what you’re dealing with is small. You’re still able to live.’”

Two and a half years in the past, she didn’t know if that will be doable.

In October of 2023, Sidner was six months into her new position as co-anchor of the community’s morning program, NCS News Central, when she found a lump in her breast that turned out to be stage 3 breast most cancers.

Since then, Sidner, who over her 31-year profession has reported on warfare, terrorism and human rights round the world, made the choice to proceed working as she underwent remedy—and to share even the “ugly, ungraceful” components along with her viewers.

That choice, she says has had a profound impact: “There’s no veneer anymore of ‘Everything’s fine, life is great.’ I’m having deeper conversations. One of the greatest gifts cancer has given me is to be able to talk to strangers as if they’re family. I’m really grateful for it.”

But that wasn’t the solely means the illness modified her. “I never want to forget what happened,” she says. “I thank cancer because it reminds me that I’m living. And it’s made me live better.”

When she first discovered the lump, she knew.

She’d had her annual mammogram earlier that 12 months, and this was not like something she’d felt earlier than. “I was like, ‘This is bad.’ Immediately.” A mammogram confirmed she wanted a biopsy, however earlier than she went in for the process, warfare broke out between Israel and Gaza. The journalist did what she’s accomplished all her working life: she went to inform the story.

While in the Middle East for three weeks, she saved feeling the lump, telling herself, ‘You have cancer. When you get home, you’re going to must take care of this.’ But in the warfare zone, she compartmentalized, “and in the most weird way, seeing what was happening there helped me.” With rockets flying overhead and warfare atrocities on the floor, “it was way greater than anything I was going through. I had a lightbulb moment where I was like, ‘[My cancer] ain’t s— compared to what these people are going through.’”

When Sidner returned to the U.S., she underwent her biopsy in Los Angeles, the place she’d been residing along with her husband of 15 years previous to her transfer to New York for the present. Despite her personal suspicions, when she acquired a telephone name that confirmed her fears, it “paralyzed” her: “I didn’t tell anyone that night. I didn’t want to burst into tears and freak out. I wanted to shield them.” Instead, the subsequent day, she did “the robot”— getting by means of her work day pretending nothing was unsuitable—earlier than calling her husband.

The couple, who stay bi-coastally (he’s a lawyer who nonetheless lives and practices in the L.A. space), had been in the physician’s workplace collectively when she discovered her most cancers was at stage 3, which, they had been instructed, had a 60 to 70 p.c survival charge. “Even though those numbers aren’t terrible, it hit my husband in the stomach. I heard him…just a guttural sound. That was really hard. I can still hear the sound,” she says, her personal voice catching as she tears up. “It’s somehow worse seeing people you love hurt than being hurt yourself.”

It took three weeks earlier than she was able to share her analysis along with her mother, 78, a British-American painter and retired instructor. (Her father, who was African American and labored for the authorities, is now deceased.) “I’m an only child, my mother is my heart,” says Sidner, who was raised in California and Florida and graduated with a telecommunications diploma from the University of Florida, the place she additionally performed volleyball. “I couldn’t deal with her pain. I didn’t want her to go through it. But she already knew. Even when you’re grown up, mothers know!”

At first, stage 3 felt like a demise sentence, she says. “I always go to the worst-case scenario. In the line of work I’m in, I’ve seen worst-case scenarios. I was like, ‘I’m going to die.’” Her intuition was to take a seat down and write letters to the individuals she beloved, “so that when you’re gone, they’ll remember how much you love them.” She started with one to her mom: “But after ‘Dear Mom,’ I stopped. I was like, ‘F— this, I’m not going to die. I’m going to do everything possible to fight this. I’m going to live.’”

That started with a dedication to maintain doing the work she beloved, at the same time as she underwent 5 months of chemo, adopted by radiation. Initially, she thought, “Maybe I won’t tell anybody. Nobody needs to know,” she says. “So many people do that. We’re afraid of job loss. We don’t want to feel pitied. We don’t want people to see us differently.”

After two rounds of chemo, she reconsidered: “I’m a freaking reporter. I tell other people’s stories all day long. Is it fair to withhold a big part of my life?” She instructed her bosses and NCS colleagues like co-anchors John Berman and Kate Bolduan “and I couldn’t have felt more supported,” she says of the workforce at News Central, which is celebrating its third anniversary this month.

But on-camera, she saved it a secret. Until one morning when she determined to check out sporting a wig on the broadcast. “It was ill-fitting to say the least, and I kept moving it during breaks,” she says. “Twitter exploded. People were like, ‘Sara Sidner should sue her makeup people because I don’t know what they did with her hair!’ I laughed.” Sidner knew she’d must go public, so she introduced her analysis on air. Afterwards, “I was exhausted in that way where even sleep can’t help. I was completely drained.”

Soon, nonetheless, she felt the impression of sharing one thing so private. “There were people coming up to me, sometimes in tears.”

She chronicled her remedy, inviting cameras into the hospital, exhibiting her chemo port, her radiation burns and her scars from her double mastectomy and DIEP flap surgical procedures. “When people ask me, ‘What are the scars like?’, I’m like, ‘You want to see them?’” (Recently she determined she’s accomplished with reconstruction surgical procedures: “I don’t want to be Barbie. What it is, is what it is. The scars are there.”)

She went on air with thinning hair and lacking eyebrows. “One in eight women go through this and I’m in the business of showing the truth. This is the truth,” she says. But “it sucked. And there were days where I’m like, ‘Girl, you look ugly as s—. I don’t know if anyone can pay attention to what you are saying ‘cause you are a hot mess.’” But at the similar time “it freed me,” she says. “It freed me from the intense perfectionist nitpicking that I was used to doing to myself. So many of those insecurities were unlocked and unleashed, and all live on TV.”

Through all of it, she leaned on her husband, who flew in to be along with her by means of surgical procedures and who “got all the bad stuff. He heard my gut-wrenching cry when I’m like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she says. “For the first time I really felt like I needed him. And he was really there. We’re even closer now because I could be completely myself, my worst self and my best self, my weakest self and my strongest self with him, and he knows he can do the same.”

Sidner was declared cancer-free in 2024, however the “long tail of cancer,” as she calls it, lingers. Radiation has left scar tissue that makes it troublesome to boost her arms and put a shirt on. She battles joint ache—“I look like an 80-year-old getting out of a chair!” And as a result of she has hormone receptor optimistic most cancers, she was thrown into menopause— and the mind fog is actual, she says: “The other day, I couldn’t remember the word ‘corn’ when I was at Chipotle. Where the hell do the words go? It’s frustrating and it pisses me off, but it’s also hilarious.”

More upsetting, she says, are the bouts of crippling loneliness which have come over her in waves, a consequence, she thinks, of confronting her mortality. “It’s visceral. I could feel it like something was gripping me,” she says. “It’s like staring into the face of God and having to explain yourself. Did I leave behind kindness? Or did I leave behind destruction and pain? The mental part of dealing with cancer is far greater and harder than the physical for me.”

But the illness has additionally given her a brand new respect for her physique. “I’d been such a jerk to myself: ‘You’re too fat. Look at that roll. Look at that scar.’ It was all critical.” Watching her physique face up to chemotherapy and heal left her in awe, she says: “This is an organism that you need to care about and love and appreciate instead of always looking at what it is that you want to change.”

Working out 5 days per week grew to become a vital a part of her routine: “It made me feel strong. Something about lifting heavy weights made me feel powerful at a time when I was so weak.” Today, she says, understanding is her sacred time: “I don’t pick up the phone. I’ve had to say to people, ‘Between this time and this time, that’s my workout. Call me later.’ ‘Is your meeting more important than my life? Hell no it isn’t.’ I don’t want to live sick. I want to live well.”

Since her restoration, Sidner says she’s been targeted on doing simply that. In December, she posted a every day reminder of issues she beloved about NYC in the winter: the Rockettes at Christmas, the Rockefeller Center tree, window decorations. “Before I was looking for big joy, big things to happen. Euphoria. But it’s the small things, it turns out, that make up life,” she says. “I’ll take small joys over big, huge productions any day.”

And she doesn’t take these joys for granted, whether or not they’re small (like her favourite pair of fuzzy yellow SpongeBob SquarePants slippers) or massive: “What I feel most grateful for is the first breath in the morning, telling me I’m still here,” she says. “It’s not promised, but I feel so thankful and joyful that I get tomorrow.”

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