The Today family is rallying around Jill Martin.
The lifestyle contributor recently shared she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I had always feared this day would come,” she wrote in an essay published to Today.com on July 17, “but I never really thought it would.”
As Martin explained in the piece, this looming fear stemmed from her own family’s experience with the disease, including her grandmother dying from breast cancer. She added that her “mother—who is healthy now—had a double mastectomy in her late 40s after being diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ often referred to as stage 0 breast cancer.”
The Shop Today with Jill Martin host cited her family’s history as the reason she stayed up to date on her screenings. In fact, she noted in her essay that she had her last mammogram in January and that it came back as normal. However, Martin said her doctors advised her to do genetic testing just in case.
“That suggestion saved my life,” she wrote. “On June 20, I got a call from Dr. Susan Drossman telling me that I was BRCA2 positive. And as it turns out, my father is BRCA2 positive, too. And because of those positive tests, which I will be forever grateful we took, my father will get screened and stay vigilant about breast, prostate and pancreatic cancer, which he now knows he’s at a higher risk for. And because of that test, I had a sonogram and an MRI and it turns out…I have breast cancer.”