Brand specialist Kodi Brown, 27, from Brisbane, was living the dream in America, working at Disneyworld, when she noticed a change in her health. Then aged 21, Kodi confessed she didn’t have the “healthiest lifestyle” but never imagined she would be diagnosed with thyroid cancer at such a young age. “I was pretty much always exhausted but I put it down to the long hours and ignored it,” Kodi tells 7Life.
Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today It wasn’t until the following year when Kodi — now a Daffodil ambassador for The Cancer Council — moved back to Australia that she decided to do something about how bad she was feeling. “My exhaustion didn’t get any better, I was always cold, my weight kept fluctuating, and I had a consistent sore throat as well as throat infections,” Kodi explains. “I felt what started out as a pea-sized lump in my throat keep growing over a seven-month period.
” By the time the lump was the size of a golf ball, Kodi’s mum encouraged her to get it checked by a doctor. “My mum had had breast cancer, so I was always thorough with getting my breasts checked but I never considered my neck region,” Kodi says. She went in for testing, including scans and blood tests, which came back inconclusive.
Due to the size of the lump, the doctors then took a biopsy. That’s when the diagnosis came back as cancerous. “I was working at a warehouse in the morning and booked a doctor appointment for my lunch break to find out the.