Hoda Kotb Recalls How Cancer Treatment Affected Her Fertility Journey

Hoda Kotb is opening up about the struggles she faced starting a family.

In a new interview with Good Housekeeping, the Today anchor got candid about how her 2007 breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment derailed her plans to have children.

“I remember that my oncologist called and we were talking about freezing my eggs. She basically said that given my age and [my breast cancer treatment], it was pretty close to a dead end,” Kotb recalled. “I was in my room and I just sobbed. I thought, ‘Well, that’s that, isn’t it?’ Like, you almost blame yourself. ‘Why didn’t I do this? Why didn’t I do that?’ So I just pushed it away, because the reality seemed impossible to bear. How do you survive knowing you can’t have what you desire and what you feel like you actually physically need?”

After a mastectomy and her recovery, Kotb and ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman adopted daughters Haley, now 5, in 2017 and, Hope, now 3, in 2019.