14 DAY TRIAL // In June this year, singer Sheryl Crow made a shock announcement: she’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor. She’s had it removed ever since and is ok because it was of the benign type. On Katie Couric’s new show, Sheryl goes into the specifics of the diagnosis.
This marks the first time the singer opens up on the topic and, to be sure, she makes it a memorable one.
Though there’s no irrefutable proof that there’s a connection between the appearance of tumors and cell phone use, Sheryl believes the many hours she spent on the phone when she was younger played a very important part in her developing one.
That part of the interview is below, embedded in the video at the end of this article.
“There are no doctors that will confirm that. [But] I do have the theory that it’s possible that it’s related to that. I [used to spend] hours on the old archaic cell phones,” Cheryl says.
Not that she had any other choice: at the time, she was promoting her first album and she needed to be available for all sorts of discussions at all times.
She also explains that she could tell something was wrong 2 years before the diagnosis: she started forgetting the words to her songs, could not carry out an intelligent conversation without struggling for words and felt as if her brain was going “mushy.”
Her physician told her she had nothing to worry because she was most likely exhausted from juggling single motherhood of two and a busy career.
“I [was] worried I had an early [onset] Alzheimer’s,” she says.
She eventually found out that the benign tumor was “nothing I have to worry about.” Nevertheless, for a breast cancer survivor to learn of the existence of such a tumor was “definitely a sobering moment,” Crow says.