NBC News correspondent Antonia Hylton is sharing for the first time that she was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, a neuroendocrine tumor.
As a journalist on the road, Hylton, 30, was used to waking up feeling out of sorts. But, about two years ago, she started having constant stomach issues.
At first, it was “easy for me to just write it off,” Hylton told TODAY’s Craig Melvin. She said she’d tell herself, “I travel, I’m on planes (and) maybe I don’t have the best diet. But I love what I do, so it’s worth it and I’m not going to let these symptoms hold me back.”
In August, however, she saw a segment on the TODAY show in which Craig retold the story of his brother’s death due to colon cancer.
“Something about that really stuck with me,” she said. That, plus a TikTok video of a woman diagnosed with colon cancer at 24, convinced Hylton to take her symptoms more seriously.
At the same time, her symptoms were getting worse. “I was waking up (and) my face was swollen. I was having trouble going to the bathroom for days on end,” she said.
Hylton tells TODAY.com that she recalls not being able to have a bowel movement for days, and when she finally was able to, “the pendulum swung in the other direction, almost like I couldn’t leave the bathroom.”
Knowing that Black people have the highest rate of colon cancer in the U.S. and that she has a family history of colon cancer, Hylton said, “I went to see a specialist who sent me for a colonoscopy.”
Three weeks after her screening — on her 30th birthday — Hylton came home from a reporting trip to find that her doctor had left her a bunch of messages.
The screening test revealed that she had a polyp in her colon. It turned out to be a neuroendocrine tumor, which is a rare type of cancer that releases hormones into the bloodstream.
“I was panicking,” Hylton said.
Neuroendocrine tumors are rare, Dr. Nooshin Hosseini, a gastroenterologist and Hylton’s doctor, said on the TODAY show during a Nov. 30 segment.
While the tumors…
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