Howie Mandel is sharing his grandson’s diagnosis for the first time.
The America’s Got Talent judge and his daughter Jackelyn Shultz shared they privately navigated her 9-year-old son Axel’s cancer diagnosis.
“The coping, it became really specific,” Howie said alongside his daughter during their appearance on the Sept. 17 episode of In Depth with Graham Bensinger. “Cause his issue is an autoimmune issue. It’s leukemia.—in fact, it’s the first time we’ve ever talked about it on camera.”
Howie, 69, shared that amid keeping Axel’s diagnosis private, he and Jackelyn—who is his cohost on the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast—had to navigate people’s negative assumptions on top of the pain of Axel’s health issues.
“We have been doing the podcast and sometimes somebody would come in to do the podcast and they’d have a cold,” Howie shared. “And she’d be wearing a mask.”
As Jackelyn explained, “And I got such hate and vitriol, and they thought I didn’t agree with their politics or whatever. And the comments in that section. In my mind, I’m like, ‘They have no idea what I’m going through right now. They have no idea I was trying to be able to go visit my son in the hospital.’”
