On Season 14 of American Idol, irreverent rocker chick, Jersey girl, and third-place finalist Jax stood out for her wild-child antics — performing “My Generation” draped in a Union Jack flag; wearing that blue-and-black (or was it white-and-gold???); infamous “Dress“; amusingly covering Adam Sandler’s Wedding Singer ditty “I Wanna Grow Old With You” on Idol’s Movie Night; rolling around on the judges’ table with finale duet partner Steven Tyler. But this week, Jax is back in the news under much more serious circumstances, revealing that she is battling both Hashimoto’s disease (a condition that causes the immune system to attack the thyroid gland) and resultant thyroid cancer — all at the age of 20.
Jax, who underwent surgery about two months ago to remove her thyroid and some of her lymph nodes, tells Yahoo Music’s Reality Rocks in an exclusive interview that at first she didn’t want to go public with her health issues. However, she eventually decided that she “really did owe” her fans an explanation. “I went completely missing in action after I sold out a show [at New York’s Webster Hall this past April],” she explains. “They all came out to support me, and then I dropped off the face of the earth — like, ‘Thanks for your tickets! Thanks for your merch sales! Bye!’ It didn’t feel right that I did that. I was even getting DMs from fans saying, ‘Jax forgot about us!’”
Now speaking freely and sharing her story, Jax goes back to where her whole ordeal began, remembering her struggle to slog through her grueling touring schedule post-Idol. She knew her unpredictable mood swings weren’t the result of typical tour fatigue, but she never thought cancer could be the underlying cause. “I was crazy-tired. I was waking up in this crazy, dark place. It got to the point where seriously, every morning, in order to go through the motions of the day, I had to call my parents. I’d break down on the phone. I was thousands of miles away from them [on the West Coast], living out of a suitcase, and I would cry on the phone every day,” she recalls. “I was even throwing up blood at one point. My whole body, all my organs, were acting funky. Nobody knew what was up.”
Even once Jax finished her tour and had a chance to relax, she still couldn’t bounce back. “I came home and I was super-sad, dragging through the day. My parents tried to help. We tried therapy. The entertainment business is super-stressful anyway, so it was kind of hard to separate what was a grieving phase for me post-American Idol — coming out of a bubble and back into the real business, which is never easy. I am the kind of person that ignores it and keeps pushing on — I don’t know how to go easy on myself and take a break — but my parents were concerned, because the last thing they wanted was for me to be burned-out at only 20 years old, doing something I’m supposed to love. Because you see that horror story all the time, like with child stars. My mom was always terrified that that would end up being me.”
Eventually, while out grocery shopping with her family, Jax noticed a lump on her neck, and her father insisted she see a doctor. She was then diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, and, Jax says, everything “finally made sense – the mood swings, the weight gain and weight loss, everything that was going on with my body. I was like, ‘Yay!’ The doctor said she’d put me on medication, I’d go gluten-free, and everything would be OK. But then as a precautionary thing, they said I should get a biopsy. They were like, ‘There’s no way it’s cancer; you’re only 20 years old… but if it makes your mom and dad feel better, let’s get it checked out.’ So we did… and they found out I had 18 tumors on my thyroid.” Twelve of those tumors were malignant.
Jax already knew about her Hashimoto’s at the time of her big Webster Hall gig, and “was just super-duper focused on that. I like to ignore it when I’m sick. I was actually in a lot of pain for that show. It was hard to sing. It was rough one for me.” A couple days later, she found out why it was such a rough show, when her biopsy results came back. “My parents held off [on telling me]; they didn’t really want to put me in a bad place,” Jax says. “It was really shocking when they sat me down and finally told me. It was like the last thing I expected. I’m kind of a goofball, so I cracked a joke; I deal with my emotions with humor and make light of things, and I am very awkward about it. But my mom was not laughing. It wasn’t funny. It took me a minute, I think. When I later told some of my closest friends, that’s when I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is really happening. I can’t believe this.’ Once it hit me, I had a few breakdowns.”
Along with fearing for her actual life and overall health, a huge concern for Jax was how her upcoming thyroidectomy would affect her voice. “Besides the fact that this iscancer, which is scary enough as it is, the surgery happens to be literally right under the vocal cords. Like, the vocal cords lie right on top of the thyroid. And my grandfather had recently gotten the surgery as well, because he had thyroid surgery before me, and he can’t talk — permanently. A whisper is all he can basically do. That’s when my mom went into full-on research mode to get the best surgeon we could find. It was terrifying, but [the specialist] assured us it would be OK. I remember waking up from the surgery and I did a mic check. I was like, ‘Check, one, two!’ Everyone yelled, ‘Jax! Go back to bed!’”
Jax was relieved that she hadn’t lost her voice entirely, like her grandfather had. But she says she’s still recovering and doesn’t quite sound like the girl who memorably auditioned for Idol with a gorgeous piano version of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” And she may never sound like that girl again. “I’m not at 100 percent. I have to give it some time. Half of my neck is still numb. It’s a very strange feeling,” she says. “It took me a minute to kind of relearn how to sing. I had to go back to my vocal coach. I was really hesitant, because it felt so funky. My muscles and nerve endings were all damaged from the surgery. A lot of people say my voice is different from how it was before — like raspier. But I’m a huge Janis Joplin fan, so I’m like, ‘Eh, it could be worse.’” Jax played a few low-key charity gigs in the past few weeks to test out her post-surgery voice, and says it “wasn’t the easiest thing, but it was really reassuring that I could still sing and get a show done.”
During her downtime while convalescing, Jax spent hours wondering why this happened to her; while cancer does run in her family (note her grandfather’s battle with the same sort of illness), she emphasizes that “none of this is for young people.” Hashimoto’s in particular usually targets middle-aged patients, not people barely out of their teens. “I went through a total ‘is this bad karma?’ phase — like, ‘What hearts did I break to deserve this? Who did I treat badly?’” she admits. “But there is no real answer. At the end of the day, it’s genetics.”
However, while Jax is hardly blaming American Idol for her illness, she does wonder if her whirlwind reality TV experience exacerbated or accelerated her condition. “Stress apparently does play a huge role… and I’m a very, very stressed-out individual,” she says. “Especially the last two years of my life have been the craziest ever. It doesn’t really get more stressful than performing in front of millions of people on national television! It takes a toll on your body, and I don’t think it helps, that’s for sure. But whether stress caused all this or not, I could never give you the answer.”
Jax has been remarkably candid regarding her feelings about her stressful Idolexperience before. Her single “La La Land,” which actually came out the day of the Idolfarewell season premiere this past January, is a scathing sendup, filled with pointed, unsubtle commentary about her TV journey. “I was going through a lot emotionally, and probably a lot was due to the Hashimoto’s,” Jax now says of the song’s creation, “but I think that material just came from the heart. It was super-cathartic for me [to write that song]. I remember I cried when I was writing it.”
Jax elaborates, saying: “There was so, so much good to come out of being on that show. I made the best friends of my life.” (She says her top five castmate Rayvon Owen has become an especially close friend, supporting her throughout her cancer struggle.) “It was the experience of a lifetime, the education of a lifetime. There were some things that I was hurt by, but at the same time, so much of that experience made me so happy.”
The “La La Land” video, which features cameos by Owen and other Idol alumni, climaxes with an eyebrow-raising scene depicting Jax getting escorted off a TV set by security — an obvious reference to the unceremonious way in which she was booted from Idol during Season 14’s finale week. “That’s where a lot of the hurt was coming from when I wrote the song,” Jax confesses. “I’d worked so hard on the show, and for the show… and that was never done in Idol history, I think ever, where they just yank someone off at the top of the show and then forget about them for the rest of the episode. It sucked. We all knew that reality TV is kind of cutthroat, but it was really, really insensitive, and it seemed kind of classless at the time.
“And afterwards, the way they treat you is so crazy. They literally wouldn’t even provide transportation for my family and I, and that was something that really hurt me too. I was super-offended by that. It’s one thing to tell me to take an Uber back to the hotel, but not my little brother. That’s not a classy move. I know friends who’ve been on America’s Got Talent and The Voice and shows like that, and they don’t treat the kids that way. It was just in poor taste, and that really hurt, because I put a lot of my life into the show. But it’s all behind us now. And despite all that, I would do it again in heartbeat.”
Back to the subject of emotional writing (“In music and art, I think the more emotional, the better,” Jax says), now the singer is tapping into her cancer battle for lyrical inspiration, with some new material hopefully out by November this year. “I am constantly writing, which is one of the awesomest parts of this whole thing. The whole time [I was recovering], I had a minute to be with myself and think. It was a rollercoaster of emotions, which I always end up letting out on paper and in song. I wrote a line that said, ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ There’s going to be a lot of stuff like that. I’m definitely in that fight-song motivational mindset right now, especially since I am training for a marathon.”
Yes, you read that right: On Nov. 6, Jax is planning to run the Tuesday’s Child marathon, the proceeds of which will go to children, families, and communities impacted by terrorism. (Jax’s father, a firefighter, was a first responder during the 9/11 attacks.) “Everyone’s calling me crazy,” Jax chuckles. But she stresses that her doctors have given her the green light, her prognosis for a full recovery is looking great (she’s currently undergoing radiation treatment), and that working towards a fitness goal will help keep her spirits high.
However, in the end, it’s really a love of music that will keep Jax going and help her heal. “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have music,” she says. “I’d probably go crazy. I’d be in some asylum somewhere — and you’d be reading about me because of that.”
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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.
