MICHAEL BECKER/FOX
American Idol alum Jackie “Jax” Cole is sharing a very difficult personal struggle a year after her time on the hit singing compeition series.
In a new interview with My Central Jersey and on social media ,Jax has opened up about her battle with thyroid cancer after being diagnosed back in April. The 20-year-old is well known from her run on American Idol after she came in third behind winner Nick Fradiani and runner-up Clark Beckham.
“It was very unexpected. When you’re 20-years-old, you have this Superman entitlement mentality, like you’re indestructible. And sometimes all it takes is God telling you it’s time to take a break for you to understand that you are most certainly not,” she explained.
In a lengthy Instagram post she said that it all began when she “was waking up in a very dark place everyday,” adding, “stress has always been a weight in my life, but over the course of a few weeks something felt different. I was losing my voice often, and struggling to keep my eyes open and my moods/energy consistent. My happiness was the last concern on my priority list and my folks knew something was definitely up.”
Cole went on to explain that she went home and while grocery shopping with her parents she “felt a small lump on my throat” and her parents urged her to have it checked and within a few appointments she was diagnosed with Hashimoto disease and and found out there were 18 tumors on her thyroid.
That, however, is when things got even more scary. “After that diagnosis, my Thyroid specialist wanted to double check and biopsy the tumors to make sure they were not cancerous. It is unlikely for Thyroid cancer to occur in younger people. I went into the hospital for a biopsy on the tumors, performed my show at Webster Hall, and got a call from the hospital a few days later. It turned out that 12 out of the 18 tumors tested positive for cancer.”
Cole has now undergone surgery to have her thyroid and several lymph nodes removed and has been having radiation treatment in New York.