CNN Anchor Sara Sidner Reveals Stage 3 Breast Cancer Diagnosis: 'I Love My Life More Now' (Exclusive) (2024)

CNN's Sara Sidner has told countless stories of people who, in the face of unthinkable challenges, gained an incredible new perspective on life — but it wasn't until her own recent stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis that she grasped what it means to view simply breathing as "enough."

"Mentally, it has been 90% good for me because it's just opened my eyes to how beautiful this life that we have is," says Sidner, who disclosed her diagnosis Monday morning on CNN News Central. "I love my life now more than I can remember since probably 7 or 8. I really, truly feel grateful just to be here."

When Sidner traveled to Israel in October to report on its unfolding war with Hamas, she had just learned that her mammogram raised cause for concern. Told that she would need a biopsy upon her return to the States, she spent three weeks in a war zone with a sense of dread in the back of mind — an experience that ultimately prepared her to confront whatever personal news was waiting at home.

"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," Sidner, 51, tells PEOPLE. "In some weird way, it helped me with my own perspective on what I am going to be facing."

As she feared, a biopsy confirmed within days of her return to New York that the lump she'd first noticed months earlier was cancerous, and had already progressed to stage 3. "When I got the news, I didn't tell anybody, not even my mother or husband or sisters or friends," she recalls. "I just needed to process it."

Jumping to the worst-case scenario in her head, Sidner immediately began viewing the diagnosis as an end-of-life concern. "The first thing I thought of was, 'You better start writing letters to the people you love because you're not going to be here,'" she says through tears. "So I started writing one to my mom, who was struggling with her own health situation."

After moving through feelings of helplessness for a few days, Sidner realized that — with months of treatment ahead — she couldn't give up yet. "I just made a decision. I'm like, 'No, you're going to live and you're going to stop this and you're going to do every single thing in your arsenal to survive this. Period.' And I have been so much happier in my life since ... I mean happier than I was before cancer."

Rather than waking up each morning and feeling bogged down by life's little stresses, Sidner says, she now wakes up "excited about whatever is coming, because I'm here."

Sidner, who serves as CNN's senior national correspondent and anchors the morning edition of CNN News Central, has not missed a day of work since her diagnosis, even appearing on the 17th Annual CNN Heroes red carpet on Dec. 10 — two days after she began chemotherapy — and hosting a live New Year's Eve special until 2 a.m.

"I am fatigued and I am slower, and I have to be more thoughtful about how I take care of myself," she admits, but now nearing the end of her first cycle of chemo, she's not willing to put her life on hold.

While Sidner considers herself a private person and hasn't quite adjusted to discussing her health out loud, she chose to open up about her disease now before it becomes too noticeable to hide.

"The bald truth is my hair's coming out," she explains — and as a woman in television, she's realized that the slightest change in hairstyle will spark a flurry of comments online. "If I'm having a bad hair day, I know about it. If I'm having a good hair day, I also know about that."

As part of her treatment — which she anticipates will involve about five months of chemo, a double mastectomy and radiation — Sidner is trying out cold capping, a modern technology designed to reduce hair loss. But still, she says, the changes are noticeable.

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"I don't put my personal stuff out there that often, but I can do something for someone because I have cancer. I can warn somebody," she says, referencing a statistic that one in eight women develop breast cancer in their lifetimes. "To all my sisters, Black, White, and brown: Please, for the love of God, do your checks yourself. ... Don't play with this, just please try to catch it before I did."

For those who have been diagnosed, Sidner hopes that her newfound strength can demonstrate that "it's not the end of your world."

"I'm living and I'm loving living because I know it can be short," she says. "I don't know how this is going to end ... [but] we have the ability to feel joy at any point as long as we're breathing."