Lara Logan is reflecting on the panic attacks she faced after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012.
The South African journalist, who now hosts Lara Logan Has No Agenda on Fox Nation, opened up in a new interview with SurvivorNet about experiencing her first panic attack shortly after learning of her stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis.
"I just wanted to come apart," Logan, 49, said. "And I felt like nobody could see it and nobody could see me and nobody understood. I ran out into the street, straight in to the street, and I don’t even remember what happened after that. I’ve never done anything like that, and I haven’t since.”
Now nine years later, Logan is fearful that her cancer may have returned. "My current situation, I’m waiting to find out the doctors are concerned about possible esophageal cancer," she told SurvivorNet.
According to the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 5.4% of women who receive treatment for breast cancer are later diagnosed with another form of cancer, unrelated to the first.
"I don’t want to make a big deal out of it because it might not be cancer," she said, "but you do always live with that in the back of your mind.”
Logan found a lump in her breast in 2012, just over a year after she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob of protestors in Egypt, where she was covering the resignation of then-president Hosni Mubarak for CBS News.
“I thought, ‘Hmm, I don’t remember that being there before,' " she recalled of finding the lump. "And that was the beginning."
Logan's doctors later discovered that the lump was cancerous, she said. After genetic testing, she was diagnosed with estrogen receptor positive (ER+) stage 2 breast cancer.
“I was in a panic and I never knew what panic felt like," she said of her reaction to the diagnosis. " 'Cause I never panicked before. I didn’t know what that feeling was. And it was terrible. And I was falling into an abyss of the unknown about something that I had known about all my life."
She continued, "And that was when the reality hit me, that you hear about cancer. You think, you know about cancer, it’s everywhere around you and yet, you know nothing. I knew nothing.”
Since the cancer was caught early, Logan was able to get a lumpectomy that removed the tumor without removing her breast. She was then treated with radiation in Washington, D.C. after the surgery.
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