After a long battle with illness, a news anchor who used to work for an ABC affiliate has died.
Tanya Spencer, who used to be an anchor on WRTV, died at the age of 53.
Tanya Sumner was better known as Tanya Spencer when she worked as a TV reporter.
WRTV, an ABC News affiliate, said she was fighting a cancer that started in her colon and spread quickly.
The news anchor passed away on May 24 at her home.
Spencer worked for twenty years as a TV reporter.
She worked as a reporter and host at WRTV for half of her career as a journalist.
In her last Facebook post, Spencer wrote something deep for her friends.
“Time. “Good health,” she told him.
“Those are the only real goods we have.” They are the only real money that matters to us.
People in Indianapolis knew her from seeing her on the news, but they also respected her right to privacy.
The former news anchor is married and has a teenage son.
The surgery she had on November 17, 2022, was one of the hardest things she had ever done in her life.
During that surgery, they found out she had colon cancer.
“I have a rare genetic mutation,” Spencer said in 2015.
If you could see me finding this grapefruit-sized tumor six years ago, we would be talking about something different.
Tanya SpencerOnce a news anchor
“The name for it is Kras G12c mutation.” It grows very quickly and is very aggressive.
She had chemo in the hopes that it would help, but it didn’t.
The cancer spread to other parts of her abdomen, making things even worse for the former news anchor.
By late 2023, she found out that the cancer-fighting drugs she had started taking after the failed chemotherapy did not work either.
She became a huge health advocate while she was fighting cancer and told everyone to get a colonoscopy.
She did this because she put off getting a colonoscopy check-up for too long.
Spencer didn’t know that screenings would have to start at age 45 instead of 50 in 2021 because of new rules.
“If you could imagine me finding this grapefruit size tumor 6 years earlier–we would be having a different conversation,” she said earlier.
“Yeah, a colonoscopy is painful, it’s unpleasant.” You don’t want a colonoscopy, but you have to get one. “Get it at 45.”