"The hat was notorious, wasn't it? The infamous hat, I love it! The hat had a whole thing of its own.The hat was on its way to the Smithsonian and that's when I found out I had to have surgery. Well, I had a tumour and that was taken care of. It's behind me and thank God it's behind me."
That was Aretha Franklin discussing her illness from 2010 which ended with rumors aplenty (we wrote tons of them), the scariest had her sufferring from Pancreatic cancer. Not the sort of thing you want your doctor telling you about late at night.
So, while it still seems somewhat secretive, apparently you had a tumour of sorts.
I am going to see here on February 17th at Radio City and couldn't be happier to discover it was a type of growth of some sort and it has gone away once and for all!!!