'DWTS' star needs surgery after finding a tumor

23-year-old professional dancer Alan Bersten shared a couple of details about his tumor and how he felt when he was diagnosed.

Entertainment Daily reported that while Bersten was touring with the Dancing with the Stars: Live! show, he started feeling intense stomach pains, which led him to visit a doctor. At that point, he was told he had high levels of calcium in the blood.

The pain never stopped, and he went back to the hospital where experts found that Bersten had a tumor on one of his parathyroid glans. They didn’t know if it was benign or malignant, so their recommendation was to extract it and perform a biopsy.

‘Just the word tumor is so frightening. I didn’t know what malignant or benign meant until I looked it up and I was like, “Well hopefully it’s benign - God forbid I have cancer.”’

Alan Bersten, Entertainment Daily, April 19, 2018.

He confessed that the most stressful part of it was not knowing whether the tumor was cancerous or not. Bersten was worried about something different, as well: the 26th season of Dancing with the Stars.

If the surgery was scheduled too close to the shows’ release date, or if the tumor was malignant, he could not take part in the competition.

Fortunately for him, doctors understood his situation and agreed to make the surgery as soon as possible. The process took two hours and the tumor was successfully removed.

After the results of the lab went back, they learned that it was benign, which meant that Bersten was out of danger. Only a week later, he was fully recovered and could meet his partner, Mirai Nagasu.

Bersten admitted that meeting Nagasu was ‘like a new life’ and pointed out that he was lucky for how good things went for him regarding his health.

He confessed that he used to feel ashamed of the scar on his neck that the surgery left but, at the moment, he considers it is ‘kind of cool.’