A scar snakes down the left side of Kashae Knox’s neck, the result of an incision she received last August to remove 30 cancerous lymph nodes from her body, the surgery taking an exhaustive 4½ hours.
This was not Knox’s first battle with cancer. She had beaten the disease a year earlier after she was diagnosed with papillary carcinoma and had her thyroid removed in 2014 at age 22.
Knox thought her cancer was gone for good after the first surgery but it returned one summer later. The second surgery removed the cancer again. Also gone was her innocence, stripped long before.