Nick Cannon recently appeared at an episode of Paramount+’s The Checkup with Dr. David Agus, where he talked about how they came to learn that their infant son had brain cancer.
He noted that his baby boy was “healthy, active, always smiling” during his early days. When Zen was around two months old, Cannon noticed his “interesting” breathing patterns.
Afraid that his newborn son may have asthma, Cannon and Scott took him to a doctor’s appointment where his physician was immediately concerned with the size of the baby’s head, which was the “first sign something was occurring.”
Zen was diagnosed with high-grade glioma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer. Cannon and Scott were presented with the option of chemotherapy as a course of treatment.
During the discussion, Cannon shared that his priority was his son’s quality of life and he didn’t want to cause him unnecessary pain.
“When we first went to the hospital, just to decrease his head from rapidly continuing to grow, there were a couple of procedures we were all for,” he said, explaining they used a shunt to drain fluid from Zen’s brain.
“That, to me, made logical sense. There was less pain on him and the procedure was quick. It was all about quality of life,” he noted.
“From that point, they pretty much told me that best case scenario, your son could live to 3 or 4 years old. So instantly when I heard that, I thought quality of life. I wanted him to have the best existence he could have.”
When it came to chemo, Cannon asked if that would extend Zen’s life or lessen his suffering, to which they told him, “not really,” because of the placement of the tumour.
“Seeing your son hooked up to all of those machines — and he had to go for a shunt two or three times, and that was heartbreaking every time — even in that short amount of time, I couldn’t imagine him having to go through chemo.”
Cannon experienced a form of chemo himself as treatment for his lupus and “knew what that did to me.”
“I knew how as a full grown man, that process… My hair was falling out,” he said. “I wouldn’t even call it pain; it just sucked everything out of you. I couldn’t imagine that on a newborn and what that would do.”
In their concerns for Zen’s quality of life, the treatment option would have also required him to “live in the hospital.”
“He would have never gone home,” Cannon said, explaining he and Scott ultimately “went to the space of ‘we want to enjoy him and we want him to enjoy [us].'”
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