June “Mama June” Shannon told ET in an interview this week that while her daughter Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell is doing well with treatment for adrenal cancer, the disease is terminal. She says her daughter is “not gonna go into remission.”
Cardwell’s cancer diagnosis was announced in March.
“She’s actually doing pretty good,” Shannon said of Cardwell after she finished four rounds of chemotherapy. “She’s handling it pretty good.”
Cardwell’s sister, Lauryn “Pumpkin” Efird added that her older sister “genuinely is OK.”
“She can still go to the grocery store, she can drive herself, she’s still able to take the kids to and from places,” Efird said, before noting that Cardwell “doesn’t have hair, she has no eyebrows, she doesn’t have any hair on her arms or anything like that.”
Cardwell, 28, has two children: Kaitlyn, 10, and Kylee, 7.
“The 10-year-old is aware, I don’t think she fully understands,” Efird said of Kaitlyn. “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, however, is “too young to understand” what’s going on, according to Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson. Thompson is Cardwell’s youngest sister.
According to Shannon, the next course of treatment would either be immune therapy or some form of treatment from a clinical trial, but she said she is not sure if her daughter will choose to move forward with either option.
“She just wants to see how it’s gonna go,” Shannon said. “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.”
“For me, it’s an emotional rollercoaster sometimes,” Shannon added. “Mentally it’s always on my mind. We know it’s terminal.”
Adrenocortical carcinoma is a rare disease in which cancer cells form in the outer layer of the adrenal gland. A person has two adrenal glands, one atop each kidney. The glands produce hormones that regulate various functions of the body including the balance of water and salt in the body, blood pressure and the use of protein, carbohydrates and fat.
Between 200 and 300 Americans are diagnosed with adrenal carcinoma in a year.
