I was 25 and had just performed at Madison Square Garden. But in a cruel twist of fate… a common health complaint turned into a devastating cancer diagnosis

There’s never a good time to be diagnosed with cancer. But to receive that diagnosis just as you’ve finally seized your long-awaited big break as a stand-up comedian? That’s downright cruel if you ask me.

And yet, that’s exactly what happened. One moment I had the world at my feet, dazzling a crowd of 20,000 at New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden. The next, I was flat on my back, trying to process a cancer diagnosis.

I was 25 years old.

On August 10, I had been randomly selected to perform for comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s popular live podcast Kill Tony – and even better, it had been a roaring success.

When I came off stage, I was bombarded with autograph and picture requests. Suddenly, bookers wanted to know my ‘avails’ – comedy slang for availability – and shows started lining up one after another.

Only a pre-scheduled operation to take my tonsils out necessitated a brief hiatus from the whirlwind. I’d been fighting recurring strep throat for the better part of a year, pushing myself through sickness after sickness until finally, my Dad, a physician and surgeon, put his foot down.

I was reluctant to go, begging my Dad to reschedule the operation, but he said the day was already locked in the books. I was to fly to Omaha, Nebraska, for surgery with my uncle, Dr. Thomas Dobleman, one of the nation’s leading head and neck surgeons.

I told myself a tonsillectomy was routine, a two-week recovery at most. It wasn’t ideal timing, especially with pivotal career opportunities unfolding, but it was manageable. I’d be back on stage in no time.   

The week leading up to my surgery was a blur of blood tests and endless paperwork— all steps required to clear me for the surgery.

The initial round of blood tests came back flawless, just as I expected. After all, aside from my constant bouts with strep, I was a healthy 20-something.

So when it was time for my preoperative physical, I wasn’t worried. I took what I thought would be a quick break while working from home as a reporter for the Daily Mail, to see a primary care doctor — a seemingly minor errand amid the chaos.

Everything felt normal: temperature, weight, height, the familiar beam of a flashlight in my eyes. Then the doctor began feeling around my neck, and I saw her eyes widen.

‘Do you feel that?’ the doctor asked me calmly.

‘Feel what?’ I replied.

She gently grabbed my hand and placed it over the left side of the base of my neck. ‘You have a mass right here on your thyroid,’ she said.

I felt the blood drain out of my face, panic clouding my mind. ‘What do you mean a mass?’ I asked, my voice cracking.

This can’t be real, I thought. My lymph nodes are always swollen because I’m always sick. She must be wrong.

The doctor explained it was likely a thyroid nodule — usually a benign growth — and reassured me it was standard to order an ultrasound. The scan was scheduled for later that same day.

Before I knew it, I was speeding across town to see the radiologist. My hands trembled as I texted my boss, my vision blurred by tears. Somehow, I managed to write that I needed the rest of the day off.

As I laid on the cold, sterile table, the technician smeared freezing jelly on my neck and methodically glided the ultrasound wand over my skin. The room was silent except for the low hum of the machine projecting the inside of my neck onto the screen.

‘Yup, that’s a nodule,’ the technician said flatly, as though pointing out something as mundane as the weather.

My heart began to race. The word ‘biopsy’ escaped his mouth, followed quickly by ‘cancer’.

My chest tightened as panic set in, but he brushed it off, assuring me that biopsies were just a precaution and that nodules were common.

Then he explained the TIRADS scoring method — a classification system that determines the risk of cancer and helps assess whether a biopsy is warranted. My score was a five indicating a high level of suspicion for malignancy.

The second I left that appointment, I called my Dad and broke down completely.

‘But remember what the PA said back in January about my neck?’ I sobbed.

Seven months earlier, during my yearly physical, a physician’s assistant had mentioned that my thyroid seemed slightly enlarged.

It wasn’t a firm diagnosis, just an observation. She’d suggested bloodwork, which came back normal, so I never thought about it again.

Even when my Dad, whose office was just upstairs from the clinic, agreed my neck did seem a little off, it hadn’t felt urgent.

Now, everything rushed back with painful clarity. What if I had done more back then? What if this had been caught earlier?

The plan to remove my tonsils the following week was quickly updated: they would biopsy the nodule while I was under anesthesia having my tonsils out, handling both procedures at once.

I went into surgery on September 23, just ten days after my debut at Madison Square Garden aired on YouTube. One of my clips had gone viral, racking up almost five million views. Messages were flooding in. I was even getting recognized on the street.

My mind was so preoccupied with booking shows and trying out the new material I’d written that I felt surprisingly calm going into surgery. I was certain the biopsy results would be benign.

The post-op recovery was uneventful. Pain meds and popsicles became my lifeline as I lounged in the living room of my Grandma’s house, crafting jokes about my liquid-only diet failing to make me lose weight.  

Three days later, we were headed out the door to replenish my dwindling supply of popsicles when Dad’s phone rang. It was Uncle Tom.

The conversation began lightheartedly enough – Dad joking about me single-handedly depleting the grocery store’s frozen aisle. Uncle Tom chuckled, asking about the scabs in my throat and reminding me to keep talking to a minimum.

Then, his voice shifted – that same heavy tone I’d heard from my primary care doctor when she discovered the nodule. 

‘We got the biopsy results back,’ he said, his words clear and deliberate. ‘It’s papillary thyroid cancer.’

Time froze. The phone slipped from my Dad’s hand as I collapsed onto my Grandma’s driveway, sobbing uncontrollably into the unforgiving concrete.

When we stumbled back into the house, my emotions boiled over. I turned to my Dad, screaming through tears of rage and despair.

‘You knew!’ I shouted, my voice shaking. ‘You knew something was wrong, and you didn’t do anything about it!’

He didn’t deserve my outburst. No one did. The truth was, no one was at fault. Seven months earlier, there had been no tumor. I had had no symptoms.

But none of that mattered in that moment. My body convulsed with sobs as I curled up on the kitchen floor, dry heaving between screams, blood filling my mouth as I irritated the area that had just been operated on.

In the span of a single phone call, my whole world turned upside down.

The visceral anger was unlike anything I had felt before. I was a 25-year-old whose career was just taking off. How could this be happening? How could I have cancer now?

Hearing my mother’s voice shatter over the phone when I told her broke me in ways I hadn’t thought possible. She tried so hard to stay strong through her sobs, but I could hear pain in every word she spoke. Her only child, her baby girl, had cancer — the same disease that had taken her mother and nearly claimed her sister, my godmother.

In an instant, I was thrust into the darkest chapter of my life, trading the most exhilarating high from the Kill Tony bump for the most heartbreaking low. 

The weeks that followed blurred into a relentless cycle of doctor’s appointments, surgeries and treatment plans. My once-vibrant world of comedy — filled with the adrenaline of shows and the warmth of laughter — shrunk into the sterile confines of Yale New Haven Hospital.

I tried to go back on stage, thinking it would ground me, but the words caught in my throat whenever someone asked how I was. Comedy had always been my escape, my way of coping with life’s struggles. But now, my humor felt hollow, my joy extinguished. 

Inside, I was crumbling — dark, bitter, terrified. I faked smiles during the day, convincing the world I was okay, but I spent most nights crying myself to sleep.

There’s no manual for navigating the kind of fear that grips you when your body betrays you.

How could the world keep turning? How could everyone else just keep living their lives while I was trapped in this nightmare? How could I have…cancer?

The truth is thyroid cancer can happen at any age, but it’s most commonly diagnosed in adults ages 30-50.

According to the National Cancer Institute, 44,020 new cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in 2024 alone — 12,500 in men and 31,520 in women. Out of those, 2,170 resulted in death. Fun fact: thyroid cancer is almost three times more common in women than in men.   

For a while, the rate of new cases of thyroid cancer was growing faster than any other cancer in the U.S., mostly because more tumors were being found during routine imaging tests like CT or MRI scans, done for other health concerns. These scans often pick up small tumors that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, many of which wouldn’t have caused any problems at all.

But recently, with doctors tightening their criteria for diagnosing thyroid cancer, the incidence rate has dropped by about two percent each year since 2014. The death rate has remained steady since 2009.

I felt caught between two worlds. On one hand, there was the comforting truth: thyroid cancer is highly treatable. The recurrence rate is almost negligible, and I wouldn’t need chemotherapy.

I tried to laugh it off, calling it ‘diet cancer’ or ‘cancer lite’ to make it feel less overwhelming. On the other hand, I knew the gravity of what I was facing.

I still had to undergo a total thyroidectomy because a 2.5 cm tumor had consumed the left side of my thyroid. That meant I’d lose the gland entirely — and with it, my body’s natural ability to produce thyroid hormones.

For the rest of my life, I’d rely on Levothyroxine, a synthetic hormone to replace what my thyroid could no longer make, keeping my metabolism and energy in check.

I hate to admit it, but one of my greatest fears wasn’t just the surgery or the cancer itself — it was the possibility of gaining weight. The thyroid is the body’s metabolic regulator, and I was about to have mine removed entirely. It sounds vain, but I know I’m not alone in worrying about it.

Ironically, the only glimmer of solace came from an unexpected side effect: Levothyroxine would actually speed up my metabolism. I had been awarded God’s Ozempic…but at a very high cost.

Two months after my diagnosis, I emerged from anesthesia after my thyroidectomy. ‘You’re all done!’ my doctor said cheerfully.

‘Ah, hell yeah,’ I mumbled groggily, the relief slowly washing over me as I pieced together that the three-hour surgery was over and I was in the recovery room.

My throat burned from the endotracheal tube that had been inserted to control my breathing and monitor the nerves to my vocal cords. But everything had gone smoothly: the tumor was gone.

Then came the news that shattered any relief I felt: the cancer had spread to two of my lymph nodes.

It meant my fight wasn’t over yet. This January, I underwent radioactive iodine treatment — a deceptively simple-sounding procedure where I swallowed a series of radioactive pills meant to target and destroy any remaining cancer cells.

I had to isolate myself from everyone, even my dog, for a week as I waited for my body to flush out the radioactive remnants of the treatment. 

I was trapped in a grueling cycle of nausea, dry mouth, relentless sweating, and crushing fatigue that made me feel like the living embodiment of a deadweight.

At the very moment I needed a hug from my family, I could only stand at a distance, waving weakly to my parents from across the house, my hands in sterile latex gloves to protect them from the radioactive iodine my body was excreting.

This ordeal is almost behind me, with monthly scans and bloodwork now a regular part of my life for the next year, but I can’t shake the overwhelming heartbreak I feel for myself. 

I had been the youngest person in the oncology ward. Most assumed I was a visitor, not the patient. But when I slipped the last hospital band off my wrist, the pain and grief hit me like a tidal wave — grief for the person I was before cancer, before my blissful ignorance and unshaken view of the world were ripped away from me.

Adjusting to daily medication has been another huge challenge. Learning how to calm my nervous system while accepting that my body now relies on something synthetic to function has been a tough pill to swallow — literally and figuratively.

I’m not out of the woods yet, but I will be, and I hold onto that belief tightly.

This journey has changed me. It’s made me stronger, more grounded, and yes, maybe even funnier. Because what doesn’t kill you…gives you new material.

Vital organs are overrated anyway.