Pop culture critic and entertainer Quentin Latham, best known as Funky Dineva, has made a career out of informing fans about the latest in news media and more. On Tuesday (Nov. 25), he took to Instagram to reveal a new challenge he’d soon be facing: cancer.
“I’m sharing this information for educational purposes and not for sympathy. I have stage one prostate cancer,” the entertainer revealed in a nearly two-minute video for his 327,000 followers.
Dineva detailed that doctors performed 12 biopsies on him, with two of them coming back cancerous and one coming back inconclusive. Thankfully, doctors told him his Gleason score, a grading system used to determine the aggressiveness of prostate cancer, was “extremely” low and that they caught the cancer at the earliest time possible.
“I fast-forwarded and asked him what my treatment options were,” Dineva said. “He said ‘radiation, some experimental drugs, or surgery by robot.”
Dineva didn’t hesitate in choosing surgery. “I didn’t need to wait for anything to come back. I have an appointment on Dec. 8 with the robot doctor to get it removed. But right now, with very little education… my gut is telling me cut it out. I don’t want to do radiation.”
Despite the revelation, the news isn’t stopping Dineva from doing what he loves. Along with a planned live session with singer K. Michelle, Dineva is set to host a supper club for the “VSOP” singer in Atlanta on December 7, one day before his surgery.
Black men are at a higher risk of developing prostate cancer, as one in six Black men will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime, according to ZeroCancer.org. In recent years, Micheal Ray Richardson, OJ Simpson, and Sidney Poitier are among notable Black men to pass away from the disease. Recently, “Grey’s Anatomy” actor James Pickens Jr. shared his diagnosis, and while he recently underwent surgery to have his prostate removed, he detailed how the disease is hereditary in his family.
“It’s not the kind of news anyone wants to hear, but to be honest, prostate cancer has run through my family,” Pickens told Black Health Matters. “My father had it. He had a lot of brothers; several of them had it. I would have been surprised if I hadn’t gotten it.”
Singer Montell Jordan opened up about having his prostate removed through a radical prostatectomy, but in September revealed that traces of the cancer were still detected in his body.
“I always imagined I would be telling my prostate cancer story from the other side of prostate cancer because I had a radical prostatectomy surgery. My prostate was removed. There were clear margins,” Jordan said on “Today.” “Close to a year post-prostatectomy, I still need to go back and have additional treatments because it’s [been] detected that there is still cancer.”
