Hoda Kotb Recalls Fertility Struggles After Treatment for Breast Cancer: 'I Just Sobbed'

Hoda Kotb discusses her journey to motherhood and experience with freezing her eggs after her breast cancer treatment in a new interview with Good Housekeeping

Photo: TODAY / GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Hoda Kotb is looking back on her difficult journey to becoming a mom after receiving her treatment for breast cancer.

In a new interview with Good Housekeeping, Kotb, 57, and her Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie spoke candidly about their roads to motherhood. When discussing the challenges they faced when starting a family, Kotb opened up about her personal struggle with freezing her eggs.

In 2007, Kotb, who is now mom to daughters Hope, 2, and Haley, 4, was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy operation.

"I remember that my oncologist called and we were talking about freezing my eggs. She basically said that given my age and [my breast cancer treatment], it was pretty close to a dead end," Kotb recalls.

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TODAY / GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

"I was in my room and I just sobbed. I thought, 'Well, that's that, isn't it? Like, you almost blame yourself. Why didn't I do this? Why didn't I do that?' " the mom of two continues.

"So I just pushed it away, because the reality seemed impossible to bear," she says. "How do you survive knowing you can't have what you desire and what you feel like you actually physically need?"

Kotb shares her daughters with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman. The former couple welcomed both of their daughters via adoption: Haley in 2017 and Hope in 2019.

Elsewhere in the interview, Kotb expressed her thoughts on being an "older" mom, sharing that she is "so much more patient and calm" at this stage in her life.

"All of a sudden all the things about having little kids that seem like a problem, you see in a whole different way," she says. "And I find myself being so much more patient and calm than I ever would have been at a younger age. You realize we sometimes blow things out of proportion."