Shanice has revealed a health scare that has shaken her world. The 51-year-old artist has been diagnosed with breast cancer after avoiding mammograms for nearly a decade.
The R&B singer, known for the 90s hits “I Love Your Smile” and “When I Close My Eyes,” revealed that doctors found a tumor in her breast during a double mastectomy surgery in May.
“I just want to tell women how important it is to get your mammograms. If I would have gone sooner, I could have caught [my breast cancer diagnosis] when it was just at stage zero,” Shanice told viewers on Wednesday’s “Good Morning America” episode.
“Put that fear aside,” she added. “If you get checked early, you can beat this thing. It’s not a death sentence. If you can get there early, you’ll live.”
The “I Love Your Smile” singer revealed that she experienced a health scare in her mid-40s when doctors suspected she had a cancerous lump in her breast.
Shanice said she was put off by mammograms after doctors incorrectly diagnosed cancer in her breasts. However, the doctors determined the lump was a cyst that didn’t require further testing.
And for eight years, she declined the recommended annual screening because she was scared.
“Because of the fear that I had when they thought they saw something, I didn’t go for eight years,” she shared.
However, when the “I Love Your Smile” singer finally returned to the doctor, she was given an actual cancer diagnosis. After noticing a lump earlier this year, she decided to have it checked again.
That decision, she claims, saved her life.
When Shanice was diagnosed with breast cancer this spring, doctors initially thought she had ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), a stage-zero cancer that only affects the milk ducts. She underwent a double mastectomy in May and learned afterward that the cancer had progressed to stage one, which was higher than expected.
“When I had my surgery and they told me I had cancer, I literally lost my smile,” Shanice said. “But I wanted to come on the show to encourage women that you have to keep smiling. I got my smile back.”
Shanice announced her double mastectomy on Instagram in September, telling her followers that she was finally “strong enough to talk about it.”
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to face in my life,” she said in the video posted on Instagram, “but I know God is with me, and everything is gonna go well.”
