George Yeo’s wife being treated for nose cancer

SINGAPORE — Mrs Jennifer Yeo, the wife of former foreign minister George Yeo, has been diagnosed with a rare form of nose cancer and has been seeking treatment in the United States since last month.

The 58-year-old lawyer revealed that she has “a very rare sino-nasal cancer” in a Facebook post yesterday, and that she missed watching her mother Mary Ho, 81, at the National Day Parade, where she performed an electric guitar solo.

Mr Yeo, 63, and two of their four children are now working out of Houston in order to be with Mrs Yeo, and expect to be there for “some months”, Mr Yeo wrote on Facebook last night. He said his wife’s cancer – called sinonasal undifferentiated carcinoma – was “rare and aggressive” but her only symptom had been the loss of her sense of smell.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic, said Mr Yeo. Mrs Yeo’s treatment consists of chemotherapy and chemo-radiotherapy. If needed, she will then undergo surgery.

The couple’s two other children and Mrs Yeo’s mother will visit when they can, wrote Mr Yeo.

He and his wife thanked the doctors at the Singapore General Hospital and National University Hospital for their help and advice. He also thanked the public for their good wishes.

Mrs Yeo had written on Facebook: “This year’s National Day is an extraordinary one for me not only because my mother, ‘Grandma Mary’, performed at the parade show, but because I couldn’t attend the National Day Parade for the first time in more than 25 years.”

Madam Ho, dubbed the “guitar granny”, had been in the news after a video of her playing Fleetwood Mac’s I Need Your Love So Bad racked up a million views on YouTube.

Mrs Yeo said she flew to Houston in Texas on July 22, the night of her birthday, for treatment at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Centre. She watched a “live feed” of the parade show remotely. 

Sino-nasal cancer constitutes about three per cent of tumours in the upper respiratory tract, and can be treated with surgery, radiation therapy or chemotherapy.

MD Anderson Cancer Centre is consistently ranked as the best hospital for cancer care in the United States.

This is not the Yeo family’s first brush with cancer. The couple’s youngest child, Frederick, now 23, was diagnosed with leukaemia (cancer of the blood) when he was three.

He received a bone marrow transplant at St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, the US, in 2004.

Mrs Yeo, chairman and founder of law firm Yeo-Leong & Peh, set up the Viva Foundation, a charity supporting children with cancer, in 2006.

Mr Yeo — who retired from politics after the 2011 General Election when his People’s Action Party team lost Aljunied group representation constituency to the Workers’ Party — is now chairman of logistics company Kerry Logistics.

He met his wife when she was a final-year law student at the National University of Singapore. They have a daughter and three sons.