prepare escaping

When I $wpdb->prepare or $wpdb->escape It adds \ before ‘
and when I call it back from the db I have all these slashes in front of single quotes/apostrophes
I’m preparing when inserting to the db and when retrieving what am I missing?

$myq = "UPDATE $ROLLCALL_table_name SET email=%s, phone=%s, birthday=%s, firstname=%s, lastname=%s, bio=%s, image=%s WHERE username=%s";

		    if($wpdb->query($wpdb->prepare($myq, $email, $phone, $birthday, $firstname, $lastname, $bio, $image, $fieldname)) === FALSE)
	{