Former television news anchor Tanya Sumner, also known as Tanya Spencer, has died at the age of 53 after a battle with an aggressive form of colon cancer. She passed away at her home on Friday.
Sumner was a news anchor for Indianapolis station WRTV for ten years and spent two decades in television journalism. She discovered she had a rare, genetically-mutated form of colon cancer, known as the Kras G12c mutation, during emergency surgery in November 2022.
According to a GoFundMe page set up by her two best friends, the cancer metastasised to her abdominal lining and eventually spread to her organs. Despite various chemotherapy treatments, the cancer persisted and grew into a network of nodule tumours that wrapped around her internal organs before spreading to her liver and lungs.
In a final Facebook post, Sumner wrote: 'Time. Good health. Those are our only true commodities. Our only true currencies that matter.' She had previously urged others to schedule routine colonoscopies, saying she regretted delaying her own. 'If you could imagine me finding this grapefruit-sized tumour six years earlier, like, we'd be having a whole different conversation,' she said in a 2023 interview.
After her journalism career, Sumner served as council vice president of District 3 in Whitestown, Indiana. Tributes have poured in from former colleagues and the community, with one resident saying she 'was fighting it with all she had and never gave up hope'.
