Sometimes, the most offbeat of things turn out to be the biggest blessing one could possibly imagine. This is what happened to HGTV’s Tarek El Moussa. His career and life were spared thanks to an eagle-eyed HGTV viewer. The viewer spotted something odd in the TV personality and urgently let him know. This ended up saving his life.
Tarek El Moussa says a fan email helped him detect his thyroid cancer
Tarek El Moussa recently posted on Instagram about an instance where a fan’s email saved his life. The TV personality captioned the post, “A fan’s email saved my life.” He explained in the video how he was saved by this one eagle-eyed fan. Moussa battled two kinds of cancer in his early days on television.
“Going into Season 2 of Flip or Flop, I remember getting an eerie email from my production company saying they received an email from the network,” he recalled, “The email said, ‘I’m a registered nurse from Texas. I noticed there’s a lump on Tarek’s neck. This is not a joke. He needs to get it checked out.”
He had it checked before, but received “nose spray and allergy medicine” for it. Tarek El Moussa decided to try a new physician. “They did a biopsy. It came back as atypical, meaning it could or could not be cancer,” he recalled, “I went in for exploratory surgery, which means they were just gonna open me up, see what’s going on. I woke up five hours later. My entire family looking down on me, crying.”
It turned out that he had thyroid cancer. However, the doctors removed his thyroid gland along with his lymph nodes. Following this, he found “an irregular testicle exam” while going through old medical records and looked into it. “I knew something was wrong. 20 minutes later, I found out I had testicular cancer,” he recalled. So now, I’m 31, two different cancers, thinking I’m gonna die. I’m a young father”.
HGTV even considered canceling his show. But he continued with his work. He said, “It was really important to me that I didn’t quit, to prove to myself and my family that nothing would stop me from building what I was building.”
It ultimately paid off, and now, Tarek El Moussa is in a better place than ever before.
Originally reported by Sourav Chakraborty on ComingSoon.
