Hoda Kotb: What I Wish I Knew Before My Battle With Breast Cancer

“Not good news for you.”

Those five jarring words are stuck in Hoda Kotb‘s memory from a February 2007 phone call with a doctor informing her that she had breast cancer.

“I think I just blacked out for the rest of it,” the Today co-anchor shared with E! News in an exclusive interview. “But it hit me like a hammer. I was shocked. We’ve done a million stories on people who said, ‘I didn’t think it would be me’ and that’s how I felt.”

For Hoda, she was healthy, had no family history and was only 43 years old. But close to 15 years after her battle with cancer, the journalist is looking back on her journey and sharing what she wish she knew the day a difficult diagnosis changed everything.

“I was just scared I was gonna die,” Hoda, now 58, said. “In hindsight, I wish that I had gone earlier to get checked. But in that moment, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just thinking about living.”