Tina Knowles, the mogul and mother of musicians Beyoncé and Solange, may have a calendar peppered with glamorous engagements and to-dos, but there’s one routine appointment she wishes she hadn’t missed: A mammogram.
Knowles revealed Tuesday that last July doctors discovered two lumps in her left breast. One was benign, the other was stage 1 breast cancer.
She was blindsided by the news, she recently told People, and knows now that it may have been caught even earlier if she hadn’t had a scheduling SNAFU due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I forgot that I didn’t go to get my test two years before I thought I had,” she told People, “because Covid came and they called me and canceled me and they said, we’ll call you when we start testing again. And I just thought I had done it. So you cannot play around with that.”
She underwent a lumpectomy to remove the tumor, as well as a breast reduction, and now feels “great,” describing herself as “cancer-free and incredibly blessed that God allowed me to find it early.”
Her daughters and family were, of course, by her side throughout the ordeal. In her memoir Matriarch, which hit shelves April 22, she writes that Beyoncé “took it well, staying positive, and I could already feel her mind racing, focusing on this as a task to tackle with precision.” Solange pledged to “take care of this,” and the two, with Kelly Rowland and Knowles’ niece, Angie Beyincé, both of whom Knowles considers bonus daughters, “became my team.”
That team, she told CBS Mornings’ Gayle King in an interview that aired Tuesday, was with her as she nervously waited to go into the operating room. Through tears, Knowles described the girls singing the hymn “Walk With Me” over her.
“I went in there feeling like you know, God has got me,” Knowles said.
Of course, there’s a reason they say that laughter is the best medicine, and Knowles got a dose before the procedure.
“All of them showed up in the hospital,” she said. “I was nervous, so they started just joking with me.” Solange played her the viral “very mindful, very demure” TikTok video. “She’s showing me this and we just look at it right before the surgery. I just start laughing. I get out of my head, I just said, I’m so happy you’re all here.”
Now that the scary incident is behind her, Knowles is determined to stay healthy and tell her story to remind people “not to slack on” their routine appointments and mammograms.
“I want to show people you can go through that and still be fly,” she told People.
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