According to a story from Daily Echo, a theatre school principal is arranging a special performance in order to celebrate her survival of thyroid cancer at only thirty years old. She will be one of the stars in a charity show that is slated to begin on March 10th. Zoe Mather started the Center Stage School of Dancing and Performing Arts and received her diagnosis of thyroid cancer in 2014 after discovering a strange lump on her throat.
Thyroid cancer generally manifests as a swelling or lump in the neck and is capable of spreading to other parts of the body in some cases. Thyroid cancer is fairly rare and risk factors for it include family history, an enlarged thyroid, and radiation exposure at an early age. It can also occur in people with Cowden syndrome. There are four different types of thyroid cancer. Symptoms include pain in the neck area and changes to the voice. Papillary thyroid cancer, which is by far the most common form, generally presents only minor risk to the patient with the five year survival rate standing at 98%. For all forms combined, the survival rate is 85% for women and 74% for men. To learn more about this cancer, click here.
For Mather, her cancer required the entirety of her thyroid to be removed. She had to recover for several months and will have to take medications to compensate for the missing gland. Ms. Mather experienced one of the rarer and more dangerous forms of thyroid cancer. She said that the financial burden was one of the most intimidating factors for her, and the charity show will help support Wessex Heartbeat and the Dorset Cancer Care Foundation. The show will feature multiple dance and choir acts from the surrounding area. Many of the various performance schools will be sharing the stage and performing together for the first time, presenting a rare opportunity for the groups to work with one another and hopefully collaborate more frequently in the future.
Now at age 34, Mather’s cancer should not return and she is expecting her first child to be born later in March.
