Brooke Burke Recalls How Her Kids Accidentally Found Out She Had Cancer: ‘Really Unfortunate’

Brooke Burke is opening up about how her kids accidentally learned she had thyroid cancer in 2012.

“It was actually really unfortunate,” Burke, 52, recalled on the Tuesday, July 9, episode of the “Getting Grilled” podcast. “I decided at that time to record a video to communicate with my audience and to post the video on social media.”

She continued: “The reason that I did that is because I didn't want it to be a headline and to start showing up everywhere with, like, that f—ked up picture and ‘Brooke has Cancer.’ And I didn’t want it to be that cover story.”

The former Dancing With the Stars cohost said she “decided to tell my own story,” adding that being able to use her own platform “is one of the things that I love about social media — that we can sort of narrate our own story.”

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Despite her best efforts, however, her kids eventually found the news on their own. “My daughter saw it on my phone before I had posted it,” Burke said. “She was like, ‘What the F, mom?’ Like, ‘How could you not tell me?’”

Burke, who shares daughter Rain, 17, and son Shaya, 16, with ex-husband David Charvet , along with daughters Neriah, 24, and Sierra, 22, with ex Garth Fisher , noted that her children “immediately” started to wonder whether she would die.

“And I think that's what people hear when you hear those words that you have cancer,” she explained. “You go, ’Oh, my God, I'm dying.’ And that's heavy and that's hard.”

Burke said that her “learning lesson” from that experience was realizing that “something larger and greater than me” can have an influence on life circumstances.

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“I had this healthy lifestyle,” she said. “I was like, ‘Cancer? What?’ Like, ‘Me?’”

She added, “And then I decided to become a really great patient and to assemble a proper team and to really get down into caring for myself.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Burke commented on how loved ones feel when someone close to them receives a diagnosis.

“I think people that are going through cancer, who are fighting that fight, I think it’s tremendously challenging for their family — especially their partners,” she explained. “People don’t always realize that and there’s not a lot of support necessarily, you know, there’s [a] tremendous amount of community support within cancer organizations.”

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She added, “But what the family goes through, they’re going through it too. They’re going through cancer as well.”

Burke underwent a complete thyroidectomy after her 2012 diagnosis and has been cancer-free since the procedure.

In 2023, Burke told Fox News Digital that she stays vigilant about her health and is “really good at keeping up with” doctors visits.

“I understand my body, I understand all those signs and symptoms,” she told the outlet. “And I just have to maintain a healthy lifestyle. So all the things that I do for both my mental wellness and physical wellness go hand-in-hand.”