Jill Dougherty Says Cancer Taught Her “What Really Mattered”

CNN foreign affairs correspondent Jill Dougherty talks about her experience with breast cancer in Ladies’ Home Journal‘s October issue (no link available).

Diagnosed ten years ago, Dougherty, 60, tells LHJ she had a lumpectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. She says she took tamoxifen for five years and now is on Arimidex.

Dougherty recalls that one month into chemotherapy, her hair started to fall out, so she shaved off the rest. “Being reduced to my bare essence,” she says, “got me thinking about who I was and what really mattered…Gradually I came to realize that I wanted to be authentic — yes, even on TV.”

Meaning, that as her hair grew back, she would not dye it as she used to — she’d keep the gray. “And going gray has turned out to be an asset,” Dougherty continues. “It gets me noticed and remembered. But most gratifying of all, it has liberated me to be exactly who I am, on camera and off: a woman, a journalist, a cancer survivor. Thanks to a disease that once threatened my life, my outside finally matches my inside.”

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