NY1 anchor Roma Torre broke the startling news to viewers on Tuesday that she’s been diagnosed with colon cancer and has taken a leave of absence to be treated for the disease.
“When this happened, I was flummoxed,” Torre, 56, told The Post about learning of her diagnosis in late July, after undergoing a routine colonoscopy she’d put off since turning 50.
“I reassessed everything that was near and dear to me, like what I was going to do with my kids, that I’d have to change my will. I was thinking it was all over,” she said. “I took for granted that my health was sound. I was so depressed for maybe 24 hours, and then I woke up in the middle of the night and it just hit me — if any good can come from this, if I can share my story . . . that made me feel so much better.
“Maybe there’s a divine purpose in all of this — that I can use my job and my name as a platform to get other people to do what I didn’t do: Heed the warnings and get yourself checked when you’re supposed to.”
Torre, married with a son and a college-age daughter, is fixture on NY1, having been been with the station since it launched in 1992. She discussed her diagnosis on-air with NY1 health reporter Erin Billups Tuesday in a report that also featured Martin Weiser, Torre’s surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Weiser told Torre that her prognosis is good, since her MRI and CAT-scan showed the cancer has not spread.
Weiser said that, if Torre has a Stage 2 cancer, she’s got an 80 percent chance of being disease-free at five years; if it’s a Stage 3 cancer, that drops to 70 to 75 percent after five years.
Torre will undergo laparoscopic (minimally invasive) surgery on Thursday — having two feet of her colon removed “just to make sure nothing has gotten free” — and might need radiation treatments, depending on the severity of her tumor.
“Those first two weeks before I saw Dr. Weiser I was in a panic — I couldn’t sleep, I was emotionally distressed and my mind kept wandering to the worst-case scenario,” Torre said. “But when I saw Dr. Weiser, he was very reassuring — in fact, what he said on camera made me feel even better.”
Torre said she kept her diagnosis hidden from her co-workers. “I was sort of keeping a policy of silence, with the exception of my bosses,” she said. “I needed to establish a sense of normalcy when I came into the office in order to cope. I have an acting background, and I was calling up all of my great acting skills. But emotionally, I was a wreck.”