Kristina Guerrero details battle with aggressive breast cancer at age 43… after a thriving career interviewing stars like George Clooney

Former E! News correspondent Kristina Guerrero, 44, got real about the aggressive breast cancer she was diagnosed with in early 2023.

After a routine mammogram, her doctors called her in for more tests after finding a cyst in her breast.

The graduate of the University of Southern California wasn’t worried though. There was no history of breast cancer in her family so she assumed it was scar tissue from a previous surgery. 

‘I never anticipated that breast cancer was necessarily going to be a part of my story,’ the mom of two told TODAY.com. 

‘It didn’t run in my family. I didn’t know anybody with breast cancer.

A few weeks went by without hearing from her doctors and she figured she was in the clear.

‘I was like, “This is really strange. It usually doesn’t take this long to get a diagnosis,”‘ she said. ‘I thought if there was something serious, they would’ve called me.

‘The reason it had taken so long was because it was a very rare form of breast cancer called angiosarcoma,’ she explained. 

The American Cancer Society defines an Angiosarcoma as ‘a rare cancer that starts in the cells that line blood vessels or lymph vessel.’

‘They had to send it out for second and third and fourth opinions before they finally recognized that this was a very rare, aggressive cancer.’ 

Johns Hopkins states that ‘Angiosarcoma is a very rare form of cancer that represents only 0.1% to 0.2% of all breast cancers. This cancer occurs in the breast and in the skin of the arms, and it begins to develop in the blood or lymphatic vessels in the breast. Angiosarcoma can grow and spread quickly throughout the body.’ 

She stressed that as a journalist, it was her job to remind women to get their mammograms, it was her job to report on stories – not to be the story herself.

‘Every October that came around, it was like, “Make sure that you go get your mammograms,”‘ she said. ‘I tried to do it around my birthday, just as a gift to myself.’

When she found out she had cancer, doctors didn’t assign a stage to it. They simply told her they’d caught it pretty early.

‘It was whiplash. I got the diagnosis, and my breast surgeon said, “What is of most importance is that we get this out of you as quickly as possible because it is a very aggressive form of breast cancer.” And so immediately within a few weeks, I was having a lumpectomy,’ she explained.

‘It was about a robin-sized egg of cancer that they removed,’ Guerrero said. ‘On the very outer parts of what they removed, there was still cancer cells detected, which means they didn’t know how much further it had gone in.’

So a week later she was back on the surgeon’s table for a mastectomy.

‘It was all fast tracked,’ she said. ‘With this mastectomy, we have removed the cancer. But the only way to be absolutely sure it is (gone) is if we do radiation.’

Kristina went through daily radiation treatments for six weeks after surgery, an experience she reflects on as surreal. 

‘I’ve described this as walking through molasses. I was living these two realities. One the one hand, I was still going to work. I was still at home,’ she said. 

‘There would be moments were I’m like, “I have cancer right now. I’m living with breast cancer and I’m living with a rare form of breast cancer that could kill me.”‘

And Walking Through Molasses became the title of the short film she made documenting her experience.

She calls the film ‘raw,’ saying, ‘It’s a 15-minute short on my experience of breast cancer told through this weird space I was in at the time.’

She hope to share it with other women – particularly Latina women – who while diagnosed at a less frequent rate than white women, more frequently get aggressive diagnoses.

Guerrera is now cancer-free and sees her doctor every six months for tests to make sure the cancer hasn’t returned.

‘For my women of color, my Latinas … it’s proven over and over again that we don’t go in for early detection that we aren’t aware of the risks of breast cancer to our bodies and so we ignore them,’ Guerrero said.

And she hopes all women understand the importance of yearly mammograms. 

‘I just hope that people will realize that I really didn’t think this was going to happen to me and then it did,’ Guerrero said. 

‘I want people to acknowledge that it can also happen to them. But they can go on and live, if they go and get their mammograms.’