Hannah Brown is opening up about her childhood health scare. In her new book,God Bless This Mess: Learning to Live and Love Through Life’s Best (and Worst) Moments, which covers everything from her childhood to her Bachelor franchise journey and the time beyond that, Brown revealed that she underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer when she was just 11 years old.
In her memoir, Brown wrote that the diagnosis came after she began to experience intense stomach pain while in fifth grade, according to Page Six. Although doctors initially diagnosed her with IBS, an MRI led to the discovery of “a tumor the size of an egg” on her pancreas. Brown was then sent for a biopsy, with her parents receiving the results just a few days later from an oncologist, who confirmed the tumor was malignant and pancreatic cancer, though it hadn’t yet spread. Brown ultimately had to undergo surgery to remove the tumor, though the then 11-year-old wasn’t afraid.
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“On the day of my surgery, I wasn’t scared about what was going to happen to me. At all,” Brown recalled in God Bless This Mess. “Even though my mother was in tears and my dad looked as worried as I’d ever seen him in my life as the nurses came to wheel me into the operating room, I looked up at my mom from my hospital bed and said, ‘Mama, I’m going to be okay.’”
Prior to the surgery, it had been uncertain whether or not Brown would need to undergo further treatment for the cancer, with the Bachelor alum writing, “there was a chance we’d have to go through radiation and chemotherapy, they said, depending on what the surgeon found once they got me into the operating room.” However, “miraculously, I didn’t need either one.” Brown said she “had to go to checkups a few times a year or so after that,” though “nothing else ever turned up in my scans or in my bloodwork.”
God Bless This Mess is Brown’s candid memoir in which she opened up about everything from the tragic murder of her aunt and cousins when she was just 6 years old to her time as a Bachelor contestant and even her N-word scandal. She told Entertainment Tonight that she believes “taking a moment to look back on all those moments that you wondered why, to really find what you’ve learned from that, what you’ve gained, find that internal wisdom and message, you can find that from any mess that you’ve had in your life if you just take a moment to look at it from a different perspective.”
