Will Reeve kept his recent cancer diagnosis quiet for months, but the ABC News correspondent is finally ready to open up about his journey — and the ways it’s connected to him to his late parents, Superman actor Christopher Reeve and Dana Reeve.

In a recent interview with People, the 34-year-old ABC News correspondent said he noticed a tender lump in the shower this past spring. Assuming it was nothing, he planned to ignore it — until his wife, Amanda, pushed him to get an ultrasound.


“I assumed it was nothing or would go away,” Reeve told People. But when doctors told him it was testicular cancer, the news caught him completely off guard: “I was stunned.”

Walking in His Parents’ Footsteps

Doctors discovered the cancer had already spread to the lymph nodes in his abdomen. In early May, Reeve underwent an orchiectomy to remove the affected testicle., Reeve said he was more nervous about the “unknown” of the surgery — his first since a tonsilectomy at age 5 — than “the overwhelming realization that I would be losing an essential part of my body forever,” he said. He then underwent two rounds of chemotherapy.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, testicular cancer is the most common cancer in men aged 15 to 44, and has a 95% five-year survival rate.

“The irony is not lost on me that 20 years after my mom died of lung cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering, there I was in the same building getting treated for cancer,” Reeve said. “I was experiencing life as each of my parents at the same time.”

Reeve added: “Because I was a cancer patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering, I was getting a firsthand experience at what my mother went through.” Receiving intense care from his wife, Amanda Dubin Reeve, also gave him insight into the experience of his father, who became paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse when Will was just two. “I was learning more about what it was like to be my dad in the final nine years of his life,” he said, “where he had my mom and our family taking care of him.”

Cancer-Free and Moving Forward

Remarkably, Reeve kept working at Good Morning America during his treatments. He wore a cold-capping helmet, which Reeve described as “the underside of a manta ray,” to avoid losing his hair on camera and relied on anti-nausea medication to get through the process before finishing his final round of chemo in late July.

“I never really felt sick at all,” he said, even though “some of the after effects [24-hour headaches, bone pain] felt like a bit of ailment whack-a-mole.”

Now officially cancer-free, he plans to go in for routine bloodwork and scans a few times a year. He hopes that by going public with his story, other men will stop ignoring physical warning signs and actually schedule a doctor’s visit.

“I was raised to share one’s struggles if, in doing so, that might help others,” Reeve told People. “It’s easy to get caught up in the madness of modern life and forget what’s most important.”



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