Twisted Sister’s Jay Jay French Reveals He Survived Prostate Cancer
Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French has revealed that he is a survivor of prostate cancer, saying in a new interview that he "had to proactively deal with it."
"I'm a prostate cancer survivor," he tells Dean Delray in the latest episode of the Let There Be Talk podcast which can be heard below. "I was diagnosed in March, and I had an operation in April, and they tell me I'm cured. They've been watching me for 15 years, 'cause my father died of it. My father died in '84. And then starting in 2004, they started watching me carefully, and my brother carefully, and we knew this wasn't a matter of 'if', it was a matter of 'when'. So when it finally diagnosed itself, it finally came up, I had to deal with it...had to proactively deal with it. So seven weeks ago yesterday, I went in the hospital and had it removed. They took it out, and it looks like they got all of it."
French went on to say that it wasn't his first brush with a serious medical issue, adding that a heart operation nearly took his life a decade ago. "When I had my heart operations ten years ago, the first one failed and almost killed me, and the second one cured me," he says. "And I faced mortality then. So I face mortality now. 'Cause we didn't know how it was gonna look until they removed it and took a look at it to see if it was gone or not gone."
Crediting his catching of the disease to doing a "ton of research," French was not only on top of the situation from the outset, he spoke to others who dealt with a similar situation.
"I analyzed every version of a solution to the problem and got the best doctor and made the best choice for me," he says. "And since it's a high-percentage disease — so many men get it — this is not gonna be an unusual situation. I can tell you that I have about ten guys who have had it who got me through it by explaining to me what they went through."
Twisted Sister called it a day in 2016 following a farewell tour which concluded in Monterrey, Mexico as part of the Corona Northside Rock Park Meeting Fest.
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