East Brunswick's Jax of American Idol Reveals She Has Thyroid Cancer

East Brunswick, NJ - Jackie Cole “Jax” Miskanic, the American Idol star who hails from East Brunswick, revealed that she has been secretly battling thyroid cancer for the past few months. Patch has covered Jax's rise to fame as a finalist on the fourteenth season of the show.

She disclosed her health news in an exclusive interview to My Central Jersey from Gusto Grill on Rt. 18 in East Brunswick. "The doctors are very optimistic about a full recovery ... I was really lucky to score with such an awesome surgical/nuclear medicine team at Cornell," she said. She recently had surgery to remove the thyroid and several nearby lymph nodes, and, despite the surgery, plans to run the New York City marathon on Nov. 6.

In an Instagram post, the singer reveals that stress had been taking a very big toll on her as she competes in L.A. She writes:

"As I was recording and doing press out on the West Coast, I noticed that I was waking up in a very dark place everyday. 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 new something was definitely up.

So, long story short, I came back home to NY for a bit (we had just sold out my first homecoming show since tour at Webster Hall in Manhattan) to rehearse. While grocery shopping with my parents, I felt a small lump on my throat. We really didn't think much of it ... Either way, my mom and dad thought it would be a good idea to check it out just in case, so I went in for some ultrasounds and tests (via Urgent Care believe it or not). A few appointmets later, I was definitively diagnosed with Hashimoto disease. The doctors found 18 tumors on my Thyroid...Which would explain what I had been going through emotionally. I'm pretty convinced after all this that my Thyroid is more important than my actual brain. 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.."