“I honestly did not want to film it at the time,” Leah Messer confessed after allowing production to film her emotional experience of finding a lump on her right breast for the Season 11 premiere of Teen Mom 2, which aired on May 4. While Leah enjoys “filming real stuff” and likes “being real for [her] audience,” the mother of three EXCLUSIVELY told HollywoodLife that she “wanted to keep [her breast cancer scare] under wraps and just deal with it on [her] own.” So what changed Leah’s mind?
“I ended up talking to Addie‘s grandma, who is a breast cancer survivor,” Leah revealed, referring to the mother of Leah’s ex-husband, Jeremy Calvert. Leah continued, “And [Jeremy’s mother] was like, ‘Yeah, it could be anything and I know that you’re remaining optimistic, but I think it’s something that you should share and film about’, and after I thought about it for a little while, I was like, ‘It is something important.'”
“So I ultimately decided to share that journey,” Leah concluded. That journey led to Leah to film a scene during the season premiere in which she called her ex, Jeremy, whom she vented her concerns to after discovering the lump in her chest while driving in the car with her daughters Addie, Aliannah “Ali” and Aleeah “Gracie.”
Leah informed Jeremy that her gynecologist suggested an ultrasound, which Jeremy urged his ex-wife to undergo. “Figure out what the f*** it is and get it took care of,” he told his ex (who also told HollywoodLife whether or not she’d ever get back together with Jeremy). Anyway, Leah did end up going to the ultrasound, and doctors told her, fortunately, that she just had a “benign tumor.”
Leah Messer’s daughters Addie, Aliannah “Ali” and Aleeah “Gracie.” [Instagram/@leahmesser]
Although the tumor turned out to be benign (which means that it’s not cancerous), Leah still worried that it “could be something more down the road” like “breast cancer.” She especially worried about needing surgery to remove the tumor — and thus, needing pain medication as well. “Being an addict and owning my addiction, any kind of surgery is terrifying for me,” Leah explained in a confessional during the May 4 premiere.
“I’m like, ‘Will I need medication?’ I just want to make sure that I’m not relapsing or having anything like that appear back in my life. I mean, you see what happened to me — I was depleted, gone, mentally, physically,” Leah said, after battling an addiction to pain pills, which she fell into after undergoing a spinal tap following the birth of Addie in 2013 that Leah said was “botched” in her 2020 memoir Hope, Grace & Faith.
“We filmed some doctor’s appointments, but even Ali’s most recent doctor’s appointment, it was great news,” Leah also told HollywoodLife. She added, “They have now discovered 150 cases like Ali’s. It was around a hundred and fifty cases of her type of muscular dystrophy and when Ali was first diagnosed with it, she was one of the eight that had been diagnosed with it — she was the only child worldwide. So to have 150 cases, although we would never want anyone to go through what she’s going through, it does give our family hope.”
