Beth and Dog Chapman are leaving behind bounty hunting following her diagnosis of throat cancer.
Instead, the pair will now appear on A&E‘s two-hour special, Dog and Beth: Fight of Their Lives.
Beth learned of her illness earlier this year and after undergoing a thirteen-hour operation to remove a stage two tumor, she and husband, Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman, will be stepping away from their beloved bounty hunting.
Beth told TooFab:
I’m lucky to be sharing Thanksgiving with my family, and I’m lucky to be here for these holidays. You take it day by day and you don’t try to take on more than you can handle.
I’ve tried to cut stress seriously out of my diet. It really does bad things to you. My voice is not strong all the time, it comes and goes sometimes and sometimes it just stops.
It was a very scary situation. It was hard to wake up every day and know you still have it, it’s still in your body, cancer is alive and well inside me and that wasn’t a good place to be.
I had a hard time sleeping, I would wake up and just look at him sleeping thinking, ‘How is he ever going to make it without me? How will he find his car keys.’ He doesn’t think about those things.
Although a harrowing watch at times, Beth thinks it was important to document and share her story, to encourage others to take action.
She added:
I think the real reason why we shared it is because our fans have lived through a lot of stuff with us. Dating way back to 2003 when my husband caught Andrew Luster, to 2005 when they tried to extradite him back to Mexico, the death of my father, the death of my daughter, our wedding, baby Lyssa’s wedding, they’ve been our fans through thick and thin and this wasn’t something you could hide.
This wasn’t like a family breakup or family riff, this was something far more serious that could have had fatal ramifications. You can’t hide it.
I felt like our fans have been so loyal to us that we really owed it to share it with them, so that if I could be a blessing to even one person, help one person get early detection, then we really owed it to them to show the struggle and show that you can make it, you can get through it, you just need to have a positive attitude.
Rest assured, Dog has been at her side every step of the way, adding:
Times have changed. We live in a different world. People have a different respect for law enforcement, which is quite saddening.
A lot of people don’t have a respect for the judicial system and it’s causing a slight collapse of our society.
I feel like, even though I had a 50/50 chance with this surgery, Duane has a 50/50 chance every time he leaves the house and that contributes to my stress.
She continued:
Will he come home alive every day that he leaves? There is a completely different mood in our country these days. There’s a big movement out there that people are trying to push the fact that people are in jail because they’re poor.
People are not in jail because they’re poor, brother, they’re in jail because they broke the law. That way of thinking could get law enforcement killed, it could get my husband killed.
I’m going through something as traumatic as what we just went through, for me a lifestyle change is in order.
Think I speak for everyone when I say I wish Beth and her family all the best in this tough time.
