Ian West/PA Wire.
Mathew Knowles, the father of singers Beyonce and Solange Knowles, has revealed that he has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
The 67-year-old opened up about the battle during an interview with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America that will air on Wednesday, October 2.
In a preview of the interview shared by Good Morning America, Knowles can be seen sitting with Strahan as he is asked what it was liked to tell his family about the diagnosis. “TOMORROW ON @GMA: @MathewKnowles, the father of @Beyonce and @solangeknowles, sits down one-on-one with @michaelstrahan and reveals his fight with breast cancer. See the EXCLUSIVE interview only on GMA tomorrow,” a tweet from Good Morning America reads.
According to ABC News, Knowles is battling stage IA breast cancer, and is hoping that by speaking out he can break through some stigmas surrounding male breast cancer and hopes he can inspire more men to speak out. He revealed he first noticed something was wrong when he spotted blood on his T-shirts.
The first day I was like “Oh, OK, no big deal … maybe it’s something that just got on my T-shirt.” Second day I looked and the same thing and I was like, “Eh … interesting.”
Then on the third day I was like, “What is this? I wonder what this is.”
He added that on the fifth day there was another tiny drop of blood so he finally told his wife, Gena Charmaine Avery, who told him she saw a drop of blood on the sheets as well. “When I had the blood on my T-shirt initially I didn’t think it was breast cancer. My mind went a lot of places. My mind went to what medication I was on, because different medications might have caused some sort of discharge … and then I thought, just because of the risk factor, that it could be breast cancer and I would go get a mammogram,” he revealed.
“For context, in 1980 I worked in the medical division of Xerox. I worked there for eight years, selling Xeroradiography, which was at that point the leading modality for breast cancer,” he added.
Knowles also shared that many of his family members have battled breast cancer. “Also, my mother’s sister died of breast cancer, my mother’s sister’s two and only daughters died of breast cancer and my sister-in-law died in March of breast cancer with three kids – a 9-, 11- and a 15-year-old — and my mother-in-law had breast cancer. So breast cancer has been all around me. My wife’s mother has breast cancer, too.”
Knowles explained that he has surgery scheduled for January to get his second breast removed in January, and is hoping to change the language around breast cancer so men are aware they can get it too.
“We have work to do. I shared with the University of Pennsylvania that if we’re going to try to emphasize breast cancer for both men and women we’ve got to change the process of getting an exam. Even from walking into a building that says “female breast clinic.” That has to be rethought, to the point that the questions that were asked: “When was the last time you had your cycle? Have you ever had a pregnancy?” These have to change. I want to emphasize that because that’s one of the things that keeps men from going. Just walking into a building, I know how I felt, walking into a room that said “female breast center.”