Bachelor in Paradise’s Joe Amabile is sharing why he opted to say yes to a potentially dangerous surgery after doctors found what appears to be a brain tumor.
Speaking to his wife, Serena Pitt, on the Thursday, July 16, episode of the “Not Married to This” podcast, Joe, 40, opened up about the tough health decisions he was unexpectedly faced with.
“I mean, there’s something in my brain. Like there’s no other way around it. Like there’s something there and that’s… you don’t want anything in your brain,” Joe said.
After sharing on Instagram earlier this week that doctors had discovered a “blueberry size lesion” on his brain, Joe is now planning surgery to remove it and have it tested.
“So, basically, it was, we’ll never know what this is by just monitoring it. We will only know by taking it out or or biopsying it,” Joe explained on the podcast. “And from my understanding, they only do biopsies in the brain if removing it is very dangerous. But where mine is located, it seems like it’s a less dangerous scale to remove it. I mean, the surgery is very dangerous.”
He continued, “Craniotomy, which is scary. It’s a serious surgery.”
Joe shared that he wanted to nip the situation in the bud after catching the potential tumor early rather than gamble with his health.
“I was pretty much like, okay to me, monitoring something that we don’t know what it is… it could potentially get worse very fast. I was kind of like, ‘I’m going to do the surgery,” he said of making the call to move forward.
Despite the seriousness of the medical procedure, Joe said he was hopeful for a positive outcome. “Hopefully they get 100% of it or at least 99.4,” he added.
Serena, 28, added that before Joe agreed to the surgery, the couple spoke with the medical experts to get their opinions.
“We did ask the neuro-oncologist and neurosurgeon separately, ‘If this was you, if you had this scan in your brain, what would you do?’ And they both without hesitation said, ‘I would take this out,’” she shared. “They said the likelihood that this is something even though it’s slow growing, it’s going to grow into something aggressive or problematic is very high.”
When Joe first shared his health news with his Instagram followers on Monday, July 13, he noted that the surgery will take place in the next two weeks.
In the social media post, Joe described experiencing “a wild couple weeks” after finding out the news.
“I definitely wasn’t expecting this,” he divulged. “I think it’s one of those things where you’re like, ‘Oh, something like this will never happen to me.’ And here I am.”
Joe gave a shout-out to New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the caption of the post.
“This past month has been a lot of ups and downs to say the least. After multiple scans and MRIs I have what looks to be an early stage brain tumor. In two weeks I’ll be undergoing a craniotomy to have it removed — yeah brain surgery — @memorialsloankettering,” he wrote. “I’m doing my best to stay positive during this time and am lucky to have a lot of support from family and friends ❤️.”
