Heavy Former "Teen Mom" star David Eason talked about his battle with a rare form of cancer.
Former “Teen Mom” star Jenelle Evans shared a video of her husband, David Eason, where he revealed he had a rare form of thyroid and lymph node cancer in 2012 and 2013.
Evans posted the story to TikTok on April 1 after she was accused of lying about her husband’s illness. “Why would anyone ever lie about cancer?” Evans captioned the video.
“I had two surgeries. Right here, where they took out my thyroid and, I think, 36 lymph nodes the first time,” Eason said, pointing to a pink scar on the front of his neck.”
Eason, 34, had two surgeries and several rounds of radiation to get rid of his cancer.
“Then, a couple of months later, I got a couple of ultrasounds and biopsies and they said there was more, uh, lymph nodes that were positive for malignancy that they had to get removed,” the former “Teen Mom” star explained. “So I had two surgeries to get them all out. And then, a couple of rounds of radiation, radioactive uptake scans.”
Evans asked her husband how his cancer battle has impacted his life. “I mean, it affects it in a lot of different ways if you don’t take your medicine properly but I’m pretty good about taking it,” Eason said, adding that he has to take medication for his thyroid or his “organs will shut down.”
According to the American Cancer Society, most forms of thyroid cancer are treatable, especially if it hasn’t spread to other parts of the body.
Around 12,000 men and 33,000 women are diagnosed with thyroid cancer annually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. It can be caused by getting too much radiation around the neck when a person is young, or it can be caused by inheriting a generic mutation from a person’s parents, the organization wrote.
Evans and Eason have been married since 2017. They have one child together, a 6-year-old daughter, Ensley. Evans is also the mother of 8-year-old Kaiser, whom she welcomed with her ex-boyfriend, Nathan Griffith; and 13-year-old Jace, whom she welcomed with her high school boyfriend, Andrew Lewis.
Evans appeared in the second season of “16 and Pregnant” in 2010 and was promoted to “Teen Mom 2.” She starred on the series until 2019, but was fired after Eason shot and killed their French bulldog, Nugget. Before that, Eason was fired by MTV in 2018 for posting offensive comments online.
The Doctors Had ‘Never Seen’ Eason’s Type of Cancer Before
Eason suffered from a rare form of cancer that had never been observed by his doctors before his case.
“The doctors had never seen it before. None of the doctors I saw knew what it was,” Eason said in the TikTok video posted to his wife’s account. “They just know that it was malignant.”
Eason sat around a table with “eight or 10” doctors “that discussed this was something they’d never seen before.
“They got my permission to do research on it. I thought they were going to get back to me with the research results but they never did,” Eason explained. “They said that it basically looked like snowflakes on my thyroid.”
Eason Opened Up About His Story in 2017
Evans’ April 1 video on TikTok wasn’t the first time Eason shared his cancer battle. While they never discussed it on “Teen Mom 2,” Eason talked about his status as a cancer survivor in a series of tweets – -which have since been deleted — in 2017.
“I’ve had two surgeries and two radiation treatments along with lifetime medications. Most people don’t know that because I’m not an attention-seeking whore like this dumb b****,” he wrote at the time, according to In Touch, although it wasn’t clear who he was talking about.
Eason was worried about cancer returning. “I have a 10 percent chance of cancer reoccurrence and being that it was in my throat and my lymph nodes, that’s not good chances,” he said, per In Touch.