CNN anchor Sara Sidner reveals stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis

CNN anchor Sara Sidner announced Monday she has been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer.

“I have never been sick a day of my life. I don’t smoke, I rarely drink. Breast cancer does not run in my family,” Sidner said on CNN’s air. “And yet here I am with stage 3 breast cancer. It is hard to say out loud.”

Sidner says she is in her second month of chemotherapy and plans to undergo radiation and a double mastectomy and noted stage 3 breast cancer “is not a death sentence anymore for most women.”

The anchor listed off a number of statistics noting the prevalence of breast cancer in women and mentioned Black women are more than 40 percent more likely than white women to die from breast cancer.

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

Sidner is an anchor on “CNN News Central” and recently traveled to the Middle East to cover the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas and the social unrest the conflict has caused.

“Seeing the kind of suffering going on where I was and seeing people still live through the worst thing that has ever happened to them with grace and kindness, I was blown away by their resilience,” she told People Magazine as part of an interview published Monday. “In some weird way, it helped me with my own perspective on what I am going to be facing.”