Meghan McCain, daughter of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and co-host of "Outnumbered" on Fox News Channel, released this statement after her father was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

"The news of my father’s illness has affected every one of us in the McCain family. My grandmother, mother, brothers, sister, and I have all endured the shock of the news, and now we live with the anxiety about what comes next. It is an experience familiar to us, given my father’s previous battle with cancer – and it is familiar to the countless American families whose loved ones are also stricken with the tragedy of disease and the inevitability of age. If we could ask anything of anyone now it would be the prayers of those of you who understand this all too well. We would be so grateful for them.

"It won’t surprise you to learn that in all this, the one of us who is most confident and calm is my father. He is the toughest person I know. The cruelest enemy could not break him. The aggressions of political life could not bend him. So he is meeting this challenge as he has had every other. Cancer may afflict him in many ways: but it will not make him surrender. Nothing ever has.

"My love for my father is boundless, and like any daughter I cannot and do not wish to be in a world without him. I have faith that those days remain far away. Yet even in this moment, my fears for him are overwhelmed by one thing above all: gratitude for our years together, and the years still to come. He is a warrior at dusk, one of the greatest Americans of our age, and the worthy heir to his father’s and grandfather’s name. But to me he is something more. He is my strength, my example, my refuge, my confidante, my teacher, my rock, my hero – my dad. -MMM"