Watch: Mama June Reveals Daughter's Just-Diagnosed Cancer is Terminal
June Shannon, star of “Mama June: From Not to Hot,” has said that she and her family are coming to grips with the fact that she may not have her eldest daughter, Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell, for much longer.
Cardwell, whose sister starred in the family’s reality show, “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” has Stage 4 adrenal carcinoma.
“We know it’s terminal,” Shannon said, according to Entertainment Tonight.
“She’s Stage 4. She’s not gonna go into remission. We’ve all accepted that, so I just tell people, ‘one day at a time,’ ’cause you never know,” she said.
“There’s days where I don’t know (whether) to scream, get mad, or be happy,” Shannon said during her ET interview, according to Today.
“As her mom, we’ve had talks you don’t want to have with your child. We know what the endgame is and we are prepared for that. You’re never prepared, but we know what could happen,” she said.
Elsewhere, in an interview with ETOnline, Shannon said Cardwell is “actually doing pretty good. She’s handling it pretty good.”
Shannon’s daughter Lauryn “Pumpkin” Efird said Cardwell “can still go to the grocery store, she can drive herself, she’s still able to take the kids to and from places.”
But the signs of the cancer are hard to miss.
Cardwell “doesn’t have hair, she has no eyebrows, she doesn’t have any hair on her arms or anything like that,” she said.
Shannon said after four rounds of chemotherapy, it’s uncertain what, if anything, Cardwell will do next.
“She just wants to see how it’s gonna go. We don’t know what to expect because the cancer is very aggressive and it grew from nothing to something huge on the left side of her body really fast,” she said.
Efird said Kaitlyn, 10, Cardwell’s older child, knows some of what is taking place around her.
“The 10-year-old is aware, I don’t think she fully understands. I think she understands that Mommy is sick and Mommy might not be here for a while… She’s 10, but she’s a lot more mature than that because she’s been raised around older people.”
Kylee, age 7, however, is “too young to understand” what’s going on, according to Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, Shannon’s youngest child.
Efird said there is always hope.
“Honestly, who’s not to say a year from now they’ll have a cure? The medical field is growing every single day. There’s always something,” she said. “Think about how quick they came out with a COVID vaccine and things like that. I truly believe eventually there will be a cure for some kind of cancer.”
Cardwell had been molested as a child by a former boyfriend of her mother, according to the Huffington Post.
“When we first met him, he was very, very nice, treated all of us girls right. And then, all of a sudden, one day, he just rubbed my leg. And then all of a sudden, it just started progressing a little closer to my areas. And then I realized, OK, something’s going on,” she has said.
“He started rubbing my back, getting closer up here, doing all this, and I’m like, OK, something weird is going on. I’m 8 years old. I don’t know anything about sex.”
She said her mother did not stand by her when she made the claims. The incident led to the two being estranged, and the cancellation of the family’s first series “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” according to Fox News.
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