Last May, meteorologist Crystal Harper was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The on-air personality for WVEC-TV in Virginia has been very open about her battle with the disease, chronicling her journey through a blog. Now, a year later, she is happy to announce that she is cancer-free.
On May 6, Harper shared the good news with her viewers on live TV. After sharing an emotional clip from the year prior when she first announced her diagnosis, Harper said, “I promised I’d be back, and here I am. And there’s just one more thing I have to do.”
With that, she removed the wig she’d been wearing since she lost her hair due to chemotherapy treatments. The moment moved Harper and her on-air colleague to tears. Watch the moving moment, as it aired on live TV, in the clip below.
In the clip, Harper’s colleague praises her for sharing her personal journey so that others who are experiencing similar illnesses may be inspired and comforted in knowing that they’re not alone. Harper was quick to clarify that others going through the same thing should only choose to stop wearing their wigs when they feel comfortable enough to do so. She likened her own wig to a “security blanket,” and emphasized that taking it off on television was difficult to do.
Harper has been nominated as a candidate in the 2018 Woman of the Year campaign through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and she has set a goal to raise $50,000 for the organization.
“I recently learned that my same diagnosis would’ve likely been a death sentence had I heard the news just 40 years ago,” she wrote on her fundraising page for the campaign. “Thanks to all of the cancer research out there, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma now has an 88.5 percent cure rate. There is still a lot of work to be done before all cancers have that same high cure rate and that can’t happen without the proper funding.”
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