Beyonce’s mother Tina Knowles has revealed she underwent surgery after being diagnosed with stage one breast cancer.
Fashion designer Knowles, 71, released her memoir Matriarch on Tuesday, which delves into her life story as well as her recent health struggles.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my left breast,” she told Gayle King on CBS Mornings.
“I’m getting emotional, because it was like, I’ve always tried to take care of myself. And I just … I was in disbelief.”
Knowles missed her breast screening (mammogram) appointment because of the Covid-19 pandemic and forgot to reschedule it until last year, which is when doctors found two tumours, one benign and another that was stage one cancer, according to King.
Knowles said: “It was stage one, which I thought was the earliest stage, and then when I told my sister she said ‘No, actually there’s a zero’, so if I had gone for my mammogram I would have got it at the zero stage.
“Thank God it was still very small, hadn’t spread. It was a very slow-spreading cancer.”
She had a lumpectomy to remove the cancer from her left breast and said her daughters, Beyonce and Solange, visited her before the surgery.
Knowles was honoured at Glamour’s 2024 Women of the Year event in October, but nearly missed the event because of an infection following the surgery.
Beyonce urged her to rest but Knowles told King: “I said ‘This is so important because of what I just went through’.
“Because a lot of my life, I just refused to be recognised. I would never take an award.
“I would never want the attention to (be on) me, and this was my saying, ‘I deserve this and and I’m gonna get there’.
“So it was only, like, maybe four weeks after (the surgery).”
Stage one breast cancer means that the cancer is small and only in the breast tissue, or it might be found in lymph nodes close to the breast, according to Cancer Research UK.
A lumpectomy, or breast-conserving surgery, is when a surgeon removes the area of cancer and some of the surrounding breast tissue.
Patients usually have radiotherapy after this surgery to destroy any cancer cells that may still be in the breast.
Knowles underwent surgery in August and is now cancer-free, according to CBS News.
