Cured: Beating Stage 4 Cancer and the Culture That Caused It

By Kate Rice

Globe-trotting reporter, party girl and empty nester Kate Rice has escaped a miserable marriage. She's started a new life: singing with a rock band and planning to leave the city to be a ski bum again. Then she gets a stage 4 cancer diagnosis and six months to live. And then she discovers the healing power of totally unleashing her own badassery.

 

She'd been chasing her dreams—singing in a rock band, doing stand-up comedy, and completing a seventeen-mile run over a 13,000-foot mountain in Colorado.  How could she have cancer?  And not just any cancer, but anaplastic thyroid cancer, one of the fastest growing and most aggressive cancers with a median survival rate of four months.

 

But anaplastic thyroid cancer never met Kate Rice. She embraces her cure—surgeries, radiation, chemo and immunotherapy—with irreppressible joie de vivre.

 

By turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, Cured chronicles a woman's transcendental and against-the-odds triumph of a good girl discovering the healing power of her own badassery.

 

Rice does more than look at beating cancer. She looks at the culture that caused it. Like so many women, she was raised to put others first, to deny her pain and delay her dreams. That meant that this outgoing woman silenced herself herself in her most intimate relationship: her marriage. She ignored her pain and did all she could to appease her husband in a vain effort to save a doomed marriage. Reasearch shows that self silencing makes woman sick. And it this book, Rice tells it all and encourages women everywhere to do the same: sstand up for what they want, express their emotions honestly so they can be their true selves: strong and healthy women. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: By the Seat of My Pants Productions LLC
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989739059

Kate Rice

Kate Rice is a prize-winning reporter, mother of two and descendant of immigrants who fled starvation and collapsing economies to find opportunity in America. She is from a purple-to-red corner of the state of Wisconsin.  She is an enthusiastic traveler, runner, newbie rock'n roll singer, standup comic, bookworm, java junkie and Green Bay Packer fan.  But most of all, she is an American who believes being a citizen of this great country is a gift and a responsibility. 

Book preview

1

THE DIAGNOSIS

UPPER WEST SIDE, NEW YORK CITY

Friday, October 1, 2021

I woke up with an ache in my heart, a song in my head, and one helluva scar on my neck.

I was officially an empty nester. The day before, I had dropped off my youngest at college in Ohio.

No more going to bed hearing her laughing with her friends in the living room. No more making her a coffee before she rushed off to work. No more hugs when she got home. I missed her, just like I already missed her big sister. She’d graduated from college five years earlier and promptly moved three-quarters of the way across the country to the Rocky Mountains.

Now, it was just me. Kids—gone. Marriage—over. Even the dog was gone. The ex had wanted her, and it was fine with me.

But I had a plan for my new aloneness. I was going to become a gypsy. Yeah. A gypsy empty nester. The day before, as I’d driven home, across Ohio, across all of Pennsylvania, alone, back to New York, I’d played Stevie Nicks’ Gypsy, and I realized that it was about me. Getting back to the girl I’d once been and who was still inside me, pushing to get out.

I’d moved to New York City thirty years earlier, after spending a season ski bumming in Aspen. Then, I’d moved to New York for grad school. My plan: hang for a few years, and then move back to the mountains. But, y’know how it goes, met a guy, fell in love, marriage, kids, mortgages. And New York City is pretty damn fun. Until it nearly kills you.

The marriage had been an unhappy one for years. Two people, once deeply in love, had fallen out of love and tried, in vain, to hold on to it. It had blown up in a firestorm; the divorce was a battle I’d barely survived. We’d sold the Upper West Side triplex we’d built together, overcoming the twin threats of Covid and a co-op board that had kept changing financial requirements for the buyers.

I looked around at my cramped apartment and thought of the old me—joyful, quirky, and often noisy as hell. But for too many years, I’d silenced myself. I’d ignored my dreams. All in a vain effort to save my marriage.

But I wasn’t a married anymore. And I was damn happy about it. Oh, yeah, I had regrets. Who doesn’t want a fairy-tale ending? Especially when you get a horror story instead? The pain of a long-disintegrating marriage and its gut-wrenching ending could still sucker punch me without warning. But I was determined to take back my life. To be me, Kate Rice, happy, a little nutty, and, most of all, free. Free to be me. Free to speak as loudly as I wanted, to say what I wanted to say, without the fear of someone trying to quash me.

Once, that someone had loved me, adored me, exactly as I was. And I’d adored him, exactly as he was. And then?

Cue Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazleton’s "You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling."

In the beginning, there had been love—his love for me, my love for him, and our love for our miracle children. There was laughter, too. Lots of it. His. Mine. All our friends who hiked with us, camped with us, and partied with us. He was funny as hell. And a lot of people never have that, never know that kind of joy. The love, the laughter, the occasionally glamorous life. You know what they say: Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.

And I had definitely lost.

But some of what I lost was good. Like having to conform to his expectations, expectations that increasingly were at odds with the woman I was. And then, of course, my expectations for him were, in the end, at odds with the man he ultimately became. Meeting his expectations meant tamping myself down. Which, alas, I did, in part out of my own guilt and insecurity. And I did it to prevent provoking him. Cross him and I’d feel a cold blast. I sensed it coming from an iceberg of anger. And it would freeze me. I’d back off and that iceberg would slowly sink back into the waves. But I knew it was always there, waiting. And I did all I could to hold it at bay.

Finally, I was free of that, free to take a breath and take the time to figure out who I really was.

Even as the divorce had ground on, even as I’d grieved for a lost love and wondered if it had ever even existed, if it had just been a fantasy I’d clung to, I had begun to change. I was discovering the infinite depths of pain—but I was determined, desperately determined, to haul myself out of those depths. I was going to live. I was going to be noisy. I was going to say exactly what I thought. I was going to sing as loudly as I wanted in the shower, around the house, or on a stage. And I had already started to do new things, things that I would never have imagined I’d do. Things that would have thrilled my sixteen-year-old self.

Three weeks earlier, I’d finished the Imogene Pass Run, a seventeen-mile run over a 13,000-foot mountain peak in the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. Both of my daughters met me at the finish line and crossed it with me. My older daughter had finished an hour and a half ahead of me and was waiting for me with her younger sister. It had been a moment of incredible joy—my daughters and one of my brothers, all together, on a stunningly perfect, golden September day in the mountains that I loved and that I knew would heal me from all of this loss.

A week after Imogene, I’d had part of my thyroid removed; the operation had left a surprisingly big scar across my neck.

A biopsy done during the surgery showed that the tissue removed was benign. Still, the surgeon told me, no running, no yoga. The scar had to heal first. And it was an impressive scar.

You look like someone tried to assassinate you, a friend had said when she saw me after the surgery.

I gingerly twisted my still tender neck and took inventory of my empty nest. I didn’t like what my life had become.

New York is great, but it is a tough place to live. There is too much cement and not enough light. There is not enough space. Apartments are not big enough. Parking is tight. Once I’d loved the game of squeezing onto the subway at rush hour. Now I didn’t want to play it anymore.

I needed room, lots of room. I needed light. I needed the mountains. When I was in college, I’d spent almost every winter and spring break skiing in Utah, Colorado, and Montana. When my daughters were growing up, we’d spend at least a week every winter and parts of a lot of summers in Utah. Winters, we mostly skied Alta, the first place I’d ever skied out West. Summers, we’d visit Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park, Canyonlands, and more. And always, we’d hang out with one or more of my three brothers and their families. They all lived either in Salt Lake or within a day’s drive of Salt Lake. They’d long been living the mountain life I wanted. I knew it was time for me to head west.

Still, I had hesitated. New York City was my daughters’ home. They’d been born in Mount Sinai Hospital in a delivery room overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Yes, their dad and I had sold their childhood home, but I was still living in their hometown. I’d moved into a small apartment on the very block they’d grown up on. If I left New York, they wouldn’t have a home with me in it to come back to. And that bothered me. A lot.

But there was a bigger reason for staying. I was scared to leave New York and move to a new town. It’s one thing to go somewhere on vacation with your family and play with your brothers and their families because they have taken time off to be with you. But it’s another thing to leave all of your friends and move across the country to a place where you know no one.

I looked at the translucent lace curtains I’d hung on my bedroom window to let in what light I could get but still soften the view of the brick wall of the building behind me.

Enough of that view, I thought. I had taken a tentative step towards leaving. I’d reserved a short-term rental in Park City, Utah, for the fall, so I could test-drive living in that mountain town while I still had an apartment in New York to fall back on. I had pushed a reluctant receptionist at Mount Sinai to schedule my follow-up visit with my surgeon a few days earlier than normal so I could head west ASAP. I was booked on a flight to Utah the very next morning.

New York, I thought. I love your subways. They are like carnival rides for a hick like me. I love your hot summers, the air above your sidewalks shimmering in the heat, women in sundresses and sandals showing off their pedicures, men with their blazers slung over their shoulders, shirts sticking to their backs. I love the snowstorms that turn you into a winter wonderland. I love living on West Seventy-Fourth Street and walking down it on rainy nights when the raindrops on the leaves reflect the streetlights. I love the shouts of the sanitation workers and the clang of their trucks on garbage days. I love everything about you, the glamor and the grit. Most of all I love you for your people, their valiance after 9/11, how they filled outdoor seating in restaurants during Covid. I love all the people I met here because they are in New York with me. New York, I love you so much!

Or did I? Maybe New York was the city I once loved. Maybe it was too intertwined with the marriage.

I took a deep breath. Okay, I thought to myself. Let’s do this. But I had one more thing to do before I left. I had to go to my follow-up appointment with my surgeon.

Six or seven years earlier, my doctor had felt indeterminate nodules on my thyroid. They weren’t malignant. But they weren’t benign either. So, every year since then, I’d gone to an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai to have a biopsy done. The nodules stayed stable. But the endocrinologist stressed how important it was to watch them. I took her warning to heart.

In late June, I’d noticed small lumps popping up in my neck, seemingly overnight. I called her office to set up an appointment, pronto. The woman on the phone offered me an appointment six months later. What? I’d protested. These are indeterminate! We can’t mess around! She was implacable. I knew a brick wall when I hit one. There was no chance of getting in before November.

I made an appointment with a general practitioner in the Mount Sinai system who could see me in two weeks. He suggested an ultrasound, which took another two weeks. The young surgeon he referred me to couldn’t see me until late August. She looked at my ultrasound and said I could wait until November for surgery. I wanted those nodules out ASAP. Years earlier, before my kids were born, I’d had a benign parotid tumor removed from my neck at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. That tumor had been surprisingly dense, the surgeon had said. And he told me to keep an eye on my neck in case it came back. These tumors don’t always stay benign, he said. They can be very, very dangerous. I told every doctor I saw at Mount Sinai that story.

In view of that, the young surgeon’s willingness to delay the surgery surprised me. I’ll take the first opening you’ve got, I said firmly. That date was in late September, 10 days after the Imogene Pass Run.

The day of my post-surgery follow-up appointment was a sunny one, so I walked over to Amsterdam Avenue to a Citi Bike station and hopped on a bike. The breeze caressed my face as I rode it down to Mount Sinai West. I wasn’t worried. I just wanted those damn stitches out. I felt like Mrs. Fucking Frankenstein.

After a twenty- or thirty-minute wait, I walked into an examining room. The young surgeon was standing there.

I’m sorry to make you wait, she said.

I shrugged. All doctors make you wait. It’s okay, I said.

She looked at me. You have cancer, she said.

I shrugged again. I’ve had cancer before, I told her.

What kind? she asked.

Melanoma, I said. Melanoma is not nothing. But I had the small growth removed, and that was it. I’d been clean for sixteen years.

Something flickered in the surgeon’s eyes. Instantly, I knew this was something different. Very, very different. How much time do I have? I asked.

She said nothing. Instead, she handed me a printout that she’d been holding.

I skimmed it. One sentence jumped out at me. What is anaplastic thyroid cancer? it read. Then the next sentence: One of the fastest growing and most aggressive of all cancers.

Not of thyroid cancers. All cancers.

Anaplastic cancer is so aggressive, the handout said, it only comes in one stage: four.

Average survival rate of six months, approximately one in five alive after twelve months.

Median survival: four months.

While overall survival rates are discouraging . . . I snorted. Discouraging? What comedian wrote this? I read on: …it is important to note that there are some long-term survivors.

That sentence was in there twice: there are some long-term survivors.

I grabbed that. I hugged it to me. I hung onto it for dear life. There are some long-term survivors.

I looked back up at the surgeon. The pathologist has never seen it before. It was a hard diagnosis to make.

If she’s never seen it before, maybe she’s wrong, I challenged her.

She’s not wrong, the surgeon replied. She paused for a moment and spoke again. I’ll pray for you.

Jesus, I thought.

This is why I had you come in early, she said.

I was the one who insisted on an earlier appointment, I thought. But, typical me, I kept my mouth shut.

Check out MD Anderson, she said.

I am done listening to anyone from Mount Sinai, I thought to myself. And I promptly drop-kicked her suggestion out of my mind.

As usual, however, I said nothing.

One thing was clear. Mount Sinai had ignored me. Someone had to take action and that someone was me. I took a screenshot of the paragraph that summed up the diagnosis. I texted it to my three brothers and my cousin Jane.

My diagnosis, I typed.

You’re very strong, the surgeon said.

Yeah, I answered, not paying much attention to her. I’ll cry at some point. Or maybe I wouldn’t.

Do you want a room? she offered solicitously.

Nah, I replied and glanced at her. I don’t have time.

Our eyes met. This was the doctor who had suggested I could put off this surgery for three months. Did she think I was just going to roll over and die because of what she and a faceless pathologist said? Two doctors who had never even seen this disease before?

They didn’t know me. I had just run—well, to be honest, walked more than I’d run—over a fucking 13,000-foot mountain with, apparently, stage four cancer. I left without saying goodbye.

My phone was already vibrating and ringing as I walked toward the elevator. My family called and texted.

Can you get a PET or CT scan? one of my brothers asked in a text. That sounded like something a doctor should suggest. I hustled back into the waiting room and politely but firmly asked to see the surgeon again.

She met me in the waiting room. Isn’t this a HIPAA violation? I thought, looking at the other people around me. Can you schedule a scan now to see if it’s metastasized? I asked.

She couldn’t. We have to wait for the monthly meeting, she said, explaining that it’s a meeting in which doctors, surgeons, endocrinologists, and oncologists discuss cases.

One of the most aggressive cancers out there and I had to wait for the fucking monthly meeting?

She nodded, then smiled at me, and then left me in the waiting room. Her coldness shook me. That’s when my cousin Jane called.

Jane lived in Houston—home of the MD Anderson Cancer Center. I’d already forgotten that the surgeon had mentioned it.

MD Anderson has a clinic that specializes in anaplastic thyroid cancer, Jane said. I’m texting you the number for intake. Then she added, You know the clinic’s acronym? I could hear the smile in her voice. FAST.

It stands for Facilitating Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer Specialized Treatment Team.

No one I dealt with at Mount Sinai had ever seen anaplastic thyroid cancer. They clearly didn’t know how to deal with it. I had to get the fuck out of Mount Sinai.

A holistic healer friend told me thyroid cancer is about unexpressed words.

I learned early to suppress my words. I grew up in the Midwest, where we were supposed to always be happy. Never be angry. Never whine. Don’t show pain, lest it cause pain for someone else. Deny compliments. If Midwesterners could take pride in anything, which they can’t, they would take pride in modesty. And most of all, never cry. Crying is for sissies, and who wanted to be a sissy? Especially if your parents called you Agnes, if you came home blubbering. My parents loved me, but they raised me to deny my pain. If I came home injured—a skinned knee or bruised feelings—my mother would respond with a hearty Cheer up! or Look on the bright side! If she thought it was something serious, she’d say, Here! Take a happy pill! And hand me a pill-sized piece of candy.

But the body will let you deny your truths only for so long. And throughout my childhood, my body found a way to express its distress. From kindergarten until college, I had eczema all over my hands. It ran up my arms. When I was really frightened, angry, or frustrated, it would run up my neck to around my ears. It itched irresistibly. I scratched uncontrollably until my skin bled, oozed, and scabbed over. Stop! my parents, siblings, friends would say in alarm as I scratched furiously. I can’t! I’d respond, desperately trying to assuage the itching. Scratching felt so unbelievably good, even though I was tearing off my own skin with my fingernails. Blood and pus stained my clothes. My fingers are still scarred.

My parents did everything they could to help me. My mother and I made constant trips to our dermatologist. Over the years, he prescribed creams, steroid shots, ultraviolet treatments, medications, something to calm me down and, because he was from Norway, cod liver oil.

None of it helped. Eczema’s incredibly itchy rash is the immune system responding abnormally to certain triggers. Those triggers can be allergens in the air—and the air of the Upper Mississippi River Valley is packed with pollen.

But emotional distress and stress can also trigger eczema’s flare-ups. Eczema is a disease of inflammation. Chronic or sustained inflammation can be fertile ground for what can turn into cancer.

Our incredible bodies have immune systems that are constantly on patrol for abnormal cells. But a weakened immune system can miss them.

Only when I got to college and started expressing more of my feelings, not just the Midwest-approved ones, did my eczema fade away. Beer was a helpful catalyst. Not the healthiest response, but it was the ‘70s. We didn’t have a clue about dealing with anxiety, PMS, stress, or heartbreak. Our therapy? Parties. Lots and lots of them.

So I totally missed what my body was trying to tell me.

My classic Midwestern upbringing didn’t cause my diagnosis. It simply laid the foundation.

2

FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE CITY

WISCONSIN TO ASPEN TO NEW YORK CITY

The 1980s

I grew up in west central Wisconsin, where cows so famously outnumber people that my hometown radio station’s call letters were WCOW.

I was a hick, but I was a hick who knew about New York City glam. It was a magical land to me. It was home to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, CBS News with Walter Cronkite, Central Park, and the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve in Times Square.

I knew all about New York because that was where my Aunt Liz lived. Aunt Liz was my dad’s youngest sister. She sparkled with New York glitter and glamour. She and her husband, Uncle Allan, rubbed shoulders with media titans like Steve Ross, the silver-haired head of Warner Brothers, and divas like Beverly Sills, famed soprano and international opera star. Aunt Liz brought us gifts from Bergdorf Goodman, Bonwit Teller, and Saks Fifth Avenue. They