Kansas’ Ronnie Platt on Recent Cancer Fight: ‘I Feel Very Lucky’

For Kansas vocalist Ronnie Platt, it was a moment where his entire life flashed before his eyes after he heard the news he had cancer.

“You know, I’m a singer that sings a couple high notes and not knowing anything about what I had, it was pretty scary,” he said during a conversation for the UCR Podcast. “The first thing that entered my mind was, okay, how much time do I have?” Thankfully, a little more than a month and a half after revealing his diagnosis of thyroid cancer, Platt is walking with a clean bill of health and preparing to return to the road with Kansas on April 4 in Ivins, Utah. But as he shared, it’s been an emotional journey.

After his initial diagnosis, he went to seek a second opinion and found out the doctor wouldn’t be able to see him until mid-April. Thanks to lucky circumstance, it turned out that guitarist Frank Sintich, his former bandmate in the ’80s Chicago-area band Chaser, had a direct connection. His girlfriend worked for the very doctor that he was trying to get in and see. Before he knew it, he was set for an appointment with Dr. Peter Angelos at the University of Chicago. By late February, he was scheduled for surgery on March 4.

As his doctors discovered, the cancer itself was possibly the result of radiation therapy he’d had in the early ’60s when his parents took him in as a young child to address a birthmark on the tip of his nose. It was something that had been incubating potentially for decades, but also was slow-moving, to the point that his doctor told him, “For [these] nodules to impact your life, you’d have to live to be 150 years old.” Though it was stressful navigating through the series of appointments and logistics, Platt is grateful with how things ultimately worked out.

How He’s Feeling Now

“It was just crazy how everything [eventually] fell into place so seamlessly,” he says. “My cousin Karen and her husband Bill took me to the hospital. They checked me in and I was out before [I knew it]. You know, [they’ve got] good drugs in them hospitals. [Platt chuckles]. The next thing I know, I’m waking up in the recovery room. All the doctor had to do is take the nodule. I still have my thyroid. It’s unbelievable. I think I was awake for an hour in the recovery room and I walked [out]. I didn’t take a wheelchair. I walked the length of that hospital to the parking garage. They gave me a prescription for pain, I never even opened the bottle. I had no pain and you can’t even see [where they went in for the procedure].”

“Here we are, 20 days [after] my surgery and I’m going to be back to work April 4 in Ivins, Utah,” he continues. “It’s just amazing. It was such a crazy roller coaster ride to find out what was going on with me and really, having the thought of, how much life do I have left? Then learning so much stuff, the ups and downs of dealing with the insurance and the frustrations to come out with the absolute most positive, uplifting outcome that could possibly happen [is wonderful].”

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“It really feels like it was just a bump in the road,” he concludes. “When I think about other friends who have gone through things like chemotherapy and being sick all of the time. I haven’t gone through that and I feel very lucky. I really feel lucky that Mother Nature sent me up a flag. You know, something told me, ‘Don’t put off seeing a doctor this time.’ The things that happened, the people that helped me and [those who] I met along the way were just amazing.”

Listen to Ronnie Platt on the ‘UCR Podcast’