Hannah Brown reveals she had pancreatic cancer at age 11.
Hannah Brown underwent pancreatic cancer surgery when she was only 11 years old.
The former “Bachelorette,” now 27, reveals in her new memoir, “God Bless This Mess,” that while trying to find an explanation for her nagging fifth-degree stomach aches, she underwent an MRI that took her to the discovery of “an egg-sized tumor” in his pancreas.
“They sent me for a biopsy and about a day later my father got a call with the results, not from our regular doctor, but from an oncologist. The tumor was malignant. Cancer. Pancreatic cancer: one of the deadliest forms of cancer there is, ”he writes.
Fortunately, the oncologist said cancer had not spread anywhere else, which reassured Brown.
“On the day of my surgery, I was not afraid of what was going to happen to me. Not at all, ”he remembers. “Even though my mother was crying and my father seemed as worried as I had never seen him in my life when the nurses came to take me to the operating room, I looked at my mom from the hospital bed and said, ‘Mom, I’ll be fine ‘”.
In fact, the only fear Brown had was losing his hair.
“There was a possibility that we would have to go through radiation and chemotherapy, they said, depending on what the surgeon found once they took me to the operating room,” he writes in the book. “But miraculously, he didn’t need either one.”
The operation ultimately did not leave any cancer cells.
“I had to go for checkups a couple of times a year or so after that,” notes the winner of “Dancing With the Stars” season 28, “but nothing else ever showed up on my scans or blood tests.”