Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French has revealed that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this year.
French said that he was diagnosed in March and had an operation to successfully remove his prostate in April.
“I’m a prostate cancer survivor,” he told comedian Dean Delray on his Let There Be Talk podcast. “They tell me I'm cured.”
French said that his father died of the disease in 1984, and he had been regularly checked because of his family history.
“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’,” he said. “So when [I was] finally diagnosed ... I had to deal with it. {I] had to proactively deal with it. ... I went in the hospital and had it removed."
French said that he has gone public with his news to raise awareness of the disease.
"To sound like an old cliché, if I can help one guy… If one person hears me and says, 'Wow! Jay Jay did it. He confronted it and he came out okay. I need to do that too,'" he said. "Don't put your head in the sand about it. Be proactive. 'Cause you don't want it to kill you."
Twisted Sister played their farewell show in 2016.
