“Mama June” Shannon has been on a “hard road” with her daughter Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell since the 28-year-old’s “bombshell” cancer diagnosis.
“I’m bluntly honest about people with this: We don’t know what the life expectancy is,” the “Mama June: Family in Crisis” star tells Page Six about her eldest child’s battle with adrenal carcinoma in an exclusive new interview.
“Her cancer is very rare. Only one in 1 million people get it,” Shannon explains.
“There [are] only a few doctors that treat it. And the couple of doctors here in the United States that treat it, I feel like — I’m not trying to be mean — are experimental doctors.”
Shannon, who is opposed to Cardwell “being an experiment project,” says her daughter is instead undergoing “very aggressive” treatment with the help of “a cancer specialist.”
Cardwell is currently on her third round of chemotherapy and has “lost all of her hair.”
Shannon, 43, tells us, “If it’s not helping, then we go back to the drawing board, and we don’t know what the next step is.”
The reality star found out about Cardwell’s cancer in February, shortly after she and her husband, Justin Stroud, tied the knot in Florida.
“We went from our wedding to the next week getting results she [has] stage 4 cancer,” Shannon recalls. “We went from everybody being happy one week to boom … spinning in a whirlwind.”
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The matriarch credits her other daughters — Jessica “Chubbs” Shannon, 26, Lauryn “Pumpkin” Efird, 23, and Alanna “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, 17 — with supporting their sister since the diagnosis.
June has been battling her own health struggles, with her headaches, dizziness and forgetfulness being documented on “Mama June: Family in Crisis.”
“Some days I can’t remember my phone … I don’t know where my credit card is,” she explains. “I’ll be like, ‘Oh s–t, where are we going down the road?'”
June calls her symptoms “frustrating,” clarifying, “It’s not every day. … It seems like the more stressed I am, the more it just happens.”
“Mama June: Family in Crisis” premieres Friday at 9 p.m. ET on WE tv.