Personal fight is public for CNN anchor: ‘I have thanked cancer for choosing me’

NEW YORK — In the moments when the effects from chemotherapy were so bad, Sara Sidner placed a bucket next to her anchor desk at CNN. You never know when you might have to vomit on national television while delivering the news.

Her pain from Stage 3 breast cancer, the months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy in May — “Oh, I feel a lot lighter,” she joked after the surgery — is not always measured in words. Her words can be beautiful, too, like when she announced her diagnosis on live television: “Just being alive feels really different to me now.”

But other times, Sidner quantifies her daily struggle and feelings — sadness, anxiety, exhaustion — with something else: poop emojis.

After her 16th and final round of chemotherapy in April, when she called in sick because she was too weak to co-anchor “CNN News Central,” the morning news show she hosts with John Berman and Kate Bolduan, that was a “seven,” which Berman described as “too much.” It was the only day Sidner called in sick during her chemo.

“Only they could make me laugh about poop and cancer at the same time,” Sidner, 52, said of her colleagues.

These brief moments of crude humor among friends offer a temporary distraction in what’s been a terrifying year. She went from thinking her life is over and writing goodbye letters to loved ones to fighting the disease like hell. This is what’s facing Sidner, a veteran journalist who won acclaim at CNN while she was an international correspondent and saw her profile increase from her coverage of George Floyd’s murder and the rising coronavirus deaths during the heart of the pandemic.

Sidner is doing what she’s done throughout the diagnosis and the treatment: She’s working. She just won her first News Emmy Award as an anchor for her coverage of the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Sidner tells anyone who wonders how she’s doing that she’s not dead. Far from it.

“I know there were days where she was not feeling well, especially during chemo, when she would have the vomit bucket near her and she was like, ‘Guys, we’re going to do the job and if need be, I’ll throw up on-air, and we’ll just keep going.’ That’s who Sara is,” said Harry Enten, a friend and CNN’s senior political data reporter.

In the process, she has not only continued to cover the biggest stories in the world, but she has also used her platform to spread awareness of breast cancer among Black women.

Black women have a lower risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer compared with White women, but they are 40% more likely to die of the disease, often because they are diagnosed at a later stage when it is harder to treat, according to the American Cancer Society.

“That she decided to go on-air and talk about what she was going through at the time and put it in the context, not because she wanted to talk about herself but help others — that defines her,” said Alexandra Heerdt, Sidner’s doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Added Monique James, a psychiatrist at the center who works with breast cancer patients: “She is reaching so many women of color because of who she is and how open she is in talking about it. That’s huge.” Sidner has repeatedly called on women to do self-exams and get mammograms.

Now, as she looks ahead to her breast reconstruction surgery in six months, Sidner is reflective about what is driving her to not let this part of her life slip away.

“I want to be of use,” she said. “I’m not allowed to give up. It’s OK to fight for yourself.”

The hardest day

When Sidner got off the phone with the nurse last October, she thought the nurse didn’t hear her. Who thanks someone for telling them they have cancer? Sidner had prepared for the worst after she discovered a lump, and doctors ordered her to get a biopsy following a mammogram. But the reality of the moment left her quiet when she got the call while at her place in New York, not immediately sharing the news with her husband, who lives in California.

When the doctor told the couple the news that the cancer was Stage 3 and Sidner’s estimated five-year survival rate was between 60 and 70%, his guttural groan is something she can still hear.

“That was the hardest day throughout all of this because I can control how I respond but I can’t control how other people feel,” she said.

Sidner was at first resigned to death and had an idea of how she was going to write the letters to her loved ones: I want you to mourn for not a second. But in the letter to her mother, she didn’t get past “Dear Mom.” That was when she felt a shift, when she decided she would channel her emotional response into attacking the disease.

“All of a sudden, it was like, this is your personal battle and if you don’t fight now, you don’t get to do anything else,” she said.

When she told her colleagues at CNN, they were floored knowing she had just been in Israel covering Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel that launched the war. Bolduan remembered Sidner popping her head in her office to share the news.

“She had said something to the effect of ‘Don’t worry, I got this. I don’t like making a big deal about it,’” Bolduan said during a Zoom call. “I was really shocked and sad, but she was smiling at me, and I remember thinking, ‘She’s smiling, so you have to be smiling. She’s going to be OK.’”

Her bosses suggested she call Jeff Zucker, former CNN president, who was treated for colon cancer decades earlier and had kept in touch with Sidner.

“I immediately gave her the same talk that I give to anyone in her position,” Zucker said in a phone interview. “We’re going to deal with it right away, make this our next assignment, and we’re going to beat this.”

Days later, doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center laid out her monthslong chemotherapy plan with an eventual double mastectomy. The decision to publicly announce her diagnosis came sooner than she expected after she struggled with a wig she wore on-air to cover up her thinning hair. The wig, she recalled, did not go unnoticed by Black Twitter.

On Jan. 8, Sidner shared with viewers how, despite never smoking, rarely drinking alcohol and not having a family history of the disease (all risk factors), she had breast cancer.

“I have thanked cancer for choosing me,” she said, holding back tears. “I’m learning that no matter what hell we go through in life that I am still madly in love with this life.”

The diagnosis, she said, had a surprising effect of making her grateful she can breathe every day. The moment quickly went viral on social media.

“She took hold of something and owned it and was honest about it,” Berman said over Zoom. “She wanted to deliver that moment straight to camera on her own, and I think there was something very powerful about that.”

Sitting in the chemotherapy chair, Sidner would dig deep, searching for zen. On her recovery days, she would read books, binge British period pieces and cartoons, or even work on her taxes (Yes, she really did this). She would also walk or run for as long as she could, or document her weightlifting on Instagram. In one video after her double mastectomy in May, she guessed her agony was comparable to a boxing match with Mike Tyson.

“He won,” she wrote. “But so did I because I survived.”

On a dreary Wednesday morning in Manhattan, Sidner, now postmenopausal, is riding the adrenaline high that comes after the show ends.

She knows the fatigue will return soon. Sidner is in the middle of radiation therapy, making the trek across town five days a week for 20-minute treatments. In six months, she will have a painful breast reconstruction surgery, which she imagines will be a 10-poop-emoji day: “I never made it to 10 before.”

Until then, she is relying on the strength she didn’t know she had. How strong is she? Sidner deadlifted 200 pounds on an off-chemotherapy day when she was supposed to feel her weakest. The feat is one of her favorite days since the diagnosis.

No matter how her cancer story ends, Sidner wants to keep it real. She reminds herself to stay grounded and stop pretending she’s OK on the days she isn’t.

“But you know what?” she asked me. “It’s still better to be alive than the alternative.

“Yeah, much better.”