239: Plot Twist: Given 10 Years to Live Due to Cancer: Here is What NY Times Bestseller Kris Carr Did To Live Her Best Life

In this bite-sized episode of The Light Watkins Show, Light Watkins revisits an inspiring conversation with Kris Carr, a New York City dancer and actress whose life took a dramatic turn when she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. As part of Light's "Plot Twist" series, Kris shares the pivotal moment that forever changed her life and career, and how a devastating diagnosis led her to discover a higher purpose.

Kris walks listeners through the unexpected detour that began with a nagging pain in her side and ultimately pushed her into a new journey of self-healing and discovery. She talks about the challenges she faced navigating the healthcare system, the financial strain of her treatment, and the emotional toll of learning to live with an incurable condition. Despite the hardships, Kris found the strength to document her healing process and turned it into a powerful documentary that later aired on the Discovery Channel.

In this candid conversation, Light and Kris explore the themes of resilience, the power of mindset, and how rejection can serve as a stepping stone to success. Kris also shares valuable lessons on learning to embrace life’s plot twists, trusting the process, and finding a purpose in unexpected places.

Listeners will walk away inspired to reframe their own challenges and detours as potential gateways to growth, purpose, and fulfillment. Whether you’re facing personal adversity or just seeking inspiration, this episode will offer valuable insights on how to turn life’s toughest moments into opportunities for transformation.

And if you’re curious how Kris navigated her healing journey, click here.

Transcript

KC: "There was a part of me that wanted the film to end with this happy story of remission. To be honest with you, the reason why it took almost five years to make was because I was still trying to cure myself because I thought it had to be like a classic hero's journey of the moment the rupture happens. And then the hero goes out and learns a whole bunch of stuff and it brings all this information back to the village. And there's some sort of great, happy ending.  But I kept pushing it off because I hadn't self cured with all of the radical, integrative, functional, back then they called it alternative treatments that I was doing, I thought none of this will be valuable unless it all goes away." 

[INTRODUCTION] 

Hello, friend. Welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I'm Light Watkins, and I have conversations with ordinary folks just like you and me who've taken extraordinary leaps of faith in the direction of their path, their purpose, or what they've identified as their mission in life. 

Today, we have a bite size plot twist episode. A plot twist is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares the story of that pivotal moment in their life trajectory, where they found the gateway to their calling. And the idea behind sharing their plot twist is to inspire you to lean into those plot twists whenever they happen in your life.

Because usually when you get turned around from whatever you thought was your path in life, what's actually happening is you're being detoured towards your actual path. And sometimes that looks like getting laid off or losing money or in the case of today's guest author and speaker Kris Carr, it's getting diagnosed with stage four cancer.

Long story short, Kris began her career as a dancer and an actress in New York City. But then in 2003, after experiencing a nagging pain in her side, a visit to her doctor confirmed that her liver was covered with cancerous tumors. And this plot twist follows Kris as she tries to make sense of this unexpected detour in her life and how it inadvertently leads her to a higher purpose, which is creating a documentary about her healing journey.

[2:23] KC: So I was diagnosed on Valentine's Day with this very rare, incurable stage 4 cancer. I was given 10 years to live. The first doctor that I spoke to suggested a triple organ transplant. I'm coming from this very different world. I did not know anything about, first and foremost, about the body.

[2:39] LW: What was the symptom? What made you go to get checked out in the first place?

[2:41] KC: I was having a lot of pain in my side. To be honest with you, I just thought it was constipation. I was like, “I think it's constipation, but maybe I should go check it out.” But I put it off –

[2:53] LW: How long had that pain been lasting? Was it a month?

[2:55] KC: I put it off for a while. Yeah, I had put it off for probably about a month, and it kept getting worse. Then I decided to go to my GP and they did ultrasound and they said that that I had lesions all over my liver, and I didn't know what lesions were. I was like, “What's a lesion? Are you sure, it's like, my liver’s cut up? Like, too many martinis? What are you saying?” They're like, “No. Lesions are tumors. You need to go get a full body scan to see if there's someplace else and then a biopsy to see what the heck they are.”

[3:29] LW: You went right to Whole Foods. Which Whole Foods did you go to?

[3:32] KC: Well, I went to Whole Foods after all that rigmarole. Then I got the scans. Then I had the first doctor appointment, the second one, the third opinion. Then finally, around that time, I was like, this is a thing. I got to figure out who to hire, who to fire, who to be on my team. This is a business and I'm going to have to be in charge of it. I don't know how to be a patient navigator. I don't know how to take care of myself. We have to figure out all those things, because this is an incurable ship pickle. Now, I'm the captain of it.

Around that time, I had met my doctor who is still my doctor 20 years later. He said, “Look, sometimes this can be slow growing. Sometimes it can be aggressive. Sometimes it can change out of nowhere. We're going to watch and wait and create a baseline and figure out how it's going to behave in you. While we're watching and waiting and tracking and creating that baseline, you need to live. You need to watch and live.”

That moment was very profound for me, because as I said, I didn't know how to do that. I thought that people who live go to Whole Foods. They eat healthy things. They seem to radiate in ways that I don't understand. I'm going to start at that grocery store and see where it takes me.

[4:58] LW:  I have a personal question. You don't have to answer it if you don't want to, but I'll ask it anyway. I find that to find those kinds of doctors, a lot of times they don't take insurance to find the best doctors. I can imagine that going through all of this and finding the best people would be very expensive. What were some of the challenges with finances at that time? Cause now, you're probably just focused all in on that. But no one really saves up for the time they get diagnosed with cancer. How was that experience?

[5:24] KC: Well, I was a member of the Screen Actors Guild at the time. I was a union member and my health insurance was through the Screen Actors Guild. I was very blessed that I had it, because to your point, that's an enormous amount of money to have to pay if it's out of pocket. I had almost let my dues lapse, which thankfully, I don't know, I think it was some guardian angel who came in and said, “Hey, open that. Be a responsible union member.” A lot of what I had experimented with and tried and I had done, I've been on a very big healing journey was and continues to be something that is out of pocket. It's challenging. There's no way around that. I also have a very supportive family, and there were times where I needed help, especially in the beginning. I am first to say, I feel very lucky that I was able to.

[6:24] LW: Okay. This is all part of your story. It’s all been well documented in your other books. Just give us a little montage of how you navigated that and how did the documentary come about and how did that lead to your marriage? All the things taking us up to now.

[6:42] KC: Yeah. I left the hospital. I went to Whole Foods. I put all the vegetables in my cart and didn't know what to do with them and was terrified of kale and thought that life is truly over, because I have to eat this thing. Then I bought some cookbooks and I started to learn how to cook healthy food. Then I realized, this doesn't have to be terrible. Actually, “Oh, wait. I'm starting to feel a little bit better.” It's the classic journey.

What happened that summer was I actually went to New Mexico and I went to the Upaya Zen Center. I've gone to Whole Foods now, because I'm thinking, okay, I'm addressing what I'm eating, but my mind is a mess and I've got to address what's eating me. I was there and I just so happened to see that Sharon Salzberg was teaching that night. I had heard of her, but I didn't know much about her. She gave Dharma talk and I was hooked. I was like, “I have no idea what's going to happen. I don't know how long I'm going to live, but however long it is, I want to feel as good as I'm feeling in this moment. I'm going to see if they'll let me stay here for a little bit.” I stayed at Upaya for a time.

That was the beginning of this healing exploration that I decided I wanted to document. First and foremost, I was documenting it for myself, but also, because as coming from the arts, coming from a place of being a creator, that's how I get to know myself, that's how I make sense of what's happening in my world. It gave me a creative focus. It gave me something to take my mind off of cancer. I started filming my experience.

[8:36] LW: Was that just you with a camera, or do you have people?

[8:38] KC: No. It was just me. I borrowed a friend's camera and he literally – I mean, I had done a lot of still photography in my business, but I didn't know how to make a film and he would teach me little things here and there. Then, I decided I wanted to make a little trailer, because I'd been filming for probably about six to eight months. A friend of mine reminded me that I knew this guy, named Brian, who I thought was a drummer, and turns out, he was a film editor. I'm like, “You mean, the drummer guy?” He’s like, “Yeah. No, he's an editor.” I was like, “Oh, I need an editor. I want to cut a little trailer, because I had heard about this industry night. All I needed was a trailer for the film that I was working on.”

He cut the trailer and we submitted it to the industry night and we actually got picked to be represented. Then I sold the film to the Discovery Channel. I mean, this is a four-year process and all of it was on my credit cards, so it's not totally a, “Oh, wow. That's so easy.”

[9:36] LW: Did Brian agree to work for pay, or was he a part of the like, “If you join me, then we'll sell it together type of a deal?”

[9:43] KC: I think he agreed to do it because he wanted to date me, quite honest.

[9:44] LW: Of course.

[9:45] KC: Yeah, that was part of it. Yes, I had no money. It was just, well, you work on this on the side and then he did get paid and he was a big part of the process. He was co-producer of the process and we got married. The end of the film ends with us getting married, which was not how I thought the film was going to end. It's like, I think there was a part of me that wanted the film to end with this happy story of remission. To be honest with you, there's the reason why it took almost five years to make was because I was still trying to cure myself, because I thought it had to be a classic hero's journey of the moment the rupture happens, and then the hero goes out and learns a whole bunch of stuff and brings all this information back to the village, and there's some great happy ending.

but I kept pushing it off because I hadn't self-cured with all of the radical, integrative, functional, back then they called it alternative treatments that I was doing. I thought, none of this will be valuable unless it all goes away. The tagline for the film ended up being “looking for a cure and finding a life.”

[11:00] LW: Was it an easy sell when you were pitching it, or did you have to go through a lot of just rejection?

[11:08] KC: And with rejection and all of it of just, you can't –

[11:12] LW: Because you think your story is really interesting, but you're like –

[11:15] KC: I thought it was interesting.

[11:17] LW: Market is like, “Well, no, no, no, no.”

[11:18] KC: Yeah. Nobody wants to hear a story about cancer and nobody wants a story about a cancer called that. It was all this no. I just said to myself, and back to your original question, if I hadn't learned how to take rejection and keep going, I wouldn't have kept pursuing it. I had taken so much rejection in my previous career that I was like, “All I need is one person to believe in me.” You just don't see it, but I see it and I'm going to keep this faith and I'm going to keep moving ahead, because I will find one person who believes in this. That was it.

[11:52] LW: I had the same thinking. The most valuable experience from modeling was all the rejection has literally – well, I didn't realize that to be a model, you have to be discovered. That's how it's traditionally done. I discovered myself. I just woke up and decided, “I'm going to be a model today.” I went to all the agencies, got rejected by everyone, and then got some more pictures, went back, got rejected by everyone again, except for the last one. That happened to me in several different markets. I just figured, “Okay. Well, this is what it is. You just get rejected until someone believes in you.”

I'm so glad that you pointed that out, because I feel like, again, a lot of people listening to this are probably going through some aspect of rejection, and so easy to personalize it and think, “Oh. Well, maybe my project is not that great.” The reality is you just need to find someone who aligns with your mission. Don't water down the mission. Just keep exploring tactics. What were some of the tactics that you had to explore that you didn't anticipate exploring when you first set off on this project to get your film and your book and all that stuff out into the world?

[12:50] KC: Well, first, I had to learn how to be a filmmaker. Thankfully, Brian was a filmmaker, is a filmmaker. He was like, “How about B-roll? How about I teach you a couple of other things?” I was like –

[13:00] LW: Oh, you didn't have any B-roll?

[13:01] KC: Oh, no. I was like, there's just nothing.

[13:04] LW: Just you on the camera all the time.

[13:06] KC: It was terrible. It was terrible. Meanwhile, I've been in the industry for how long? I think part of it was I was so hungry to learn and I was so excited. It was that hunger and that excitement and that connection to curiosity and joy. Even though what I was talking about was really tough stuff, it was very fueling for me. Just staying in that place was how I just kept moving forward. Also, I think when you come from a background of being an actor, or a model, or performer, you're used to playing somebody else. You're used to projecting a certain image that it's not necessarily you. The shift for me was, “This is your opportunity to be fully yourself. The more fully yourself you are, the better chance it has.”

[14:02] LW: Was that intuitive, or did someone guide you in that direction?

[14:06] KC: I think it was partly intuitive, but it was also the clips that I would show that were more raw, or more vulnerable, or had my real humor were the things that the network was responding to. Anything that was too polished or performative was like, we would get an enormous amount of notes and deflated and whatnot. I was like, “Oh, so the goal is just to be yourself. I got it. Who is that? Well, guess we'll find out.”

[END]

That was Kris Carr, and to see the rest of this story and how the documentary comes together and how she navigated her healing journey, you can go to episode 175 and start at around the 31-minute mark. And in addition to listening to the rest of Kris's episode, I also recommend following Kris on the socials @CrazySexyKris. And that's K R I S. 

And if you connected with our conversation, you also want to check out my interviews with Elissa Goodman. which is in episode 109. Elissa beat her cancer diagnosis and in the process she developed a health protocol to help others who are going through their healing journey.

You may also want to listen to Jessica Janzen's episode, which is 120. Jessica's son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called spinal muscular atrophy, and his passing led to her creating a foundation to help other families who are navigating healing journeys.

And then one other interview that I want you to check out is with Jay Smiles, whose mom was diagnosed with dementia. And Jay became a full time caregiver for her mother, which was the experience that ultimately led her to her calling, which was stand up comedy and that's episode number 99. And if you know anyone else who's making the world a better place and they have an incredible plot twist in their life, email me your guest suggestions at light@lightwatkins.com.

My other ask is that you take a few seconds to leave a rating or review for this show. You hear podcast hosts like me asking listeners like you all the time for ratings because that's how a lot of guests will determine if they are going to even come onto the podcast. So it does make a huge difference. And all you do is you look at your device, you click on the name of the show, you scroll down past the first few episodes, you'll see a place with five blank stars. Just tap the star all the way on the right to leave a five star rating. 

And if you're feeling generous, write a one line review, just letting a potential new listener know which episode they should consider starting with, and that can go a long way as well. 

Also, you can watch these plot twist episodes on my YouTube channel if you want to see what Kris looks like as she's sharing her plot twist, and don't forget to subscribe on YouTube as well. 

And in the meantime, I will see you Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place. And until then, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart. Keep leaning into those plot twists whenever they happen in your life. And if no one's told you lately that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic weekend.