It was the assignment from hell, but it may have saved her life.
ABC anchor Amy Robach “reluctantly” agreed to have a mammogram on live TV for the Oct. 1 kickoff of Breast Cancer Awareness Month — only to learn that she has the life-threatening disease. Now, she is slated for a double mastectomy on Thursday.
Robach, 40, made the announcement on “Good Morning America” Monday as she sat on a couch holding hands with colleague and breast-cancer survivor Robin Roberts — one of several people who pushed her to do the on-air mammogram.
“I’ve decided to be very aggressive,” Robach said. “I’ll have reconstructive surgery. There’s a lot you don’t know until you have the surgery.
“I don’t know about chemo,” she said. “I don’t know what stage I am. I don’t know if it has spread. So we’ll find out those things in the weeks to come.”
blog post on ABC’s Web site, Robach wrote that she fought the assignment when she was first approached about it, noting she “would have considered it virtually impossible” that she had cancer.
“That day, when I was asked to do something I really didn’t want to do, something I had put off for more than a year, I had no way of knowing that I was in a life-or-death situation,” wrote Robach, who’s married to “Melrose Place” actor and Do Something co-founder Andrew Shue.
Eventually, Roberts and others convinced her.
“So, on October 1, I had my first mammogram, in front of millions of people,” she wrote.
“After breathing a big sigh of relief once it was done, my breath was taken away only a few weeks later.
“I thought I was going back in for a few follow-up images,” Robach recounted, “only to find out in a matter of hours that I had breast cancer.
“The doctors told me bluntly: ‘That mammogram just saved your life.’ ”
On GMA, Robach thanked Roberts for encouraging her to take the exam.
“I wasn’t in any rush to have that done any time soon,” she said. “And I had cancer the whole time we were sitting in that office. I was saying, ‘I don’t have any connection to this disease.’ And wow, boy.”
Robach said she hopes to help other women by going public with her story.
“I can only hope my story will do the same and inspire every woman who hears it to get a mammogram, to take a self exam,” she wrote. “I got lucky by catching it early, and there are so many people to thank for making sure I did. Every producer, every person who urged me to do this, changed my trajectory.
“I was also told this: For every person who has cancer, at least 15 lives are saved because people around them become vigilant. They go to their doctors, they get checked,” she wrote. “No excuses. It is the difference between life and death.”