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Tina Knowles revealed in her memoir Matriarch that she needed a skin graft following a freak cooking accident involving boiling oil
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She had been cooking fish when she hit the skillet’s handle, sending the hot liquid flying and dripping down her leg, melting through her skin
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Matriarch is available for purchase wherever books are sold
Tina Knowles revealed a scary incident that happened in her kitchen over 20 years ago,
In her memoir Matriarch, Tina, now 71, recalled needing a skin graft following a freak cooking accident in July 2004.
To keep up her mother’s tradition of cooking large dinners every Sunday, Tina wrote about one time where she was frying fish in a skillet while her husband at the time Mathew Knowles and stylist Ty Hunter were over in New York.
While cooking, she was on the phone with her pregnant daughter Solange, who was asking for instructions to cook chicken with a “cooking bag.” However, Tina left out a key step in putting the bag into a pan before placing it in the oven.
Solange, 38, called back to tell her that she wound up dropping the meal because of it. Tina laughed about the mishap and, upon hanging up the phone, hit the sizzling skillet’s handle, sending the contents flying.
Chris Haston/WBTV via Getty
Tina Knowles in 2025
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The skillet fell off the stove towards Tina’s stomach and pelvis, sending the “boiling lava” of oil down her left leg. “The oil melted through the stretch of the jeans, then my skin, continuing down through my skin to the muscle,” she recalled, being in so much pain she couldn’t even scream.
Mathew, now 73, and Hunter were unable to hear what was going on in the kitchen. She stayed “trapped in the excruciating pain” with it reaching her bones, before Mathew found her and Hunter called 911.
Tina lost the feeling in her fingers and was rushed to the hospital by EMTs. At the hospital when the doctor arrived to check her out, Tina was told her left leg would be smaller than her right.
Tina spent over a week in the hospital healing, undergoing a daily debridement (which removed dead and infected skin cells) before she was able to go in for her skin-graft surgery.
She likened the debridement to being sent to “the torture chamber,” where she experienced “showers of high-powered hoses held on the burnt skin to get the top layer off.” Tina could hear other patients screaming in paint from the treatment.
Ahead of the skin-graft procedure, Tina worked in the hospital. The day before the operation, Solange was having her baby shower in Houston, which Tina didn’t want to miss.
Despite her doctors’ advice, she flew to Houston on a private plane to be there for Solange and came back for a Destiny’s Child photoshoot in New York the following day.
One World Publishing
‘Matriarch’ by Tina Knowles
Though she underwent surgery later than she was scheduled, apologizing to her doctor profusely, blaming flight delays, Tina’s doctor “killed that surgery,” moving skin from her hip to her thigh and grafting the wound.
Throughout her book, Tina also writes about hearing Beyoncé’s shout-out to Uncle Johnny in her song “HEATED,” her divorce from Richard Lawson and more.
Matriarch is available for purchase wherever books are sold.
Read the original article on People
