Eugene Mayor Kaarin Knudson says she's been navigating her first 10 months in office while undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
Knudson, who was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer at the beginning of the year, said she is now cancer free. She spoke to KLCC’s Rebecca Hansen-White about her experience.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Hansen-White:
We heard at city council you share a proclamation about breast cancer awareness month, and then, talk about your own experience. What made you decide 'I think this would be a thing that I like to talk to the community about?'
Knudson:
You know, sometimes when you're talking about something as scary as cancer or a serious health diagnosis, it can be a little bit hard to find a way into the conversation. I think also, for a lot of people, it can be hard to feel like there's even an appropriate venue for talking about what you're going through. It just felt like an opportunity for me to be in integrity with my role and with our community and share that i've been navigating this diagnosis, the second diagnosis, in my treatment through 2025 and now I'm so delighted to be on the other side of all of that and looking into a completely healthy future.
Hansen-White:
Well, congratulations. I think people sometimes wait a long time to get this stuff figured out, because they'll say 'This is just an annoying little health thing' when it could actually be something serious. Did you have an experience like that, or what made you realize something's wrong?
Knudson:
Well, I love this question and what you're thinking about, because early detection is really important as it relates to all sorts of different types of cancer, but certainly to breast cancer. For most people, that means following up on your regular screenings and following the instructions of, you know, medical advice medical associations and your and your doctors. For young people, that means recognizing that when something doesn't feel right or is really abnormal is out of the ordinary, not just leaning on your health and your youthful energy levels, but actually following up and making sure that things are okay.
In my case, when I was 31 and encountered breast cancer for the first time some of the initial feedback that I heard even when reaching out to medical professionals was completely well founded, in that they were looking at my, my health profile, the fact that I'd never even broken a bone. I'd had no experiences with hospitals or with our American sort of medical apparatus. So, when I first saw the first doctor after I found a lump in my right breast, all of those years ago, that feedback was, ‘well, you're so healthy let's just watch this for a little bit.’ In a lot of cases, that might be the right advice.
What I would just encourage people to keep in mind is to pay attention to your own internal compass, and I knew at that point that it was not normal, and it wasn't something that I thought was a part of any kind of typical cycle for me, hormonally or in my young life. I knew it wasn't right, and so following up right away was actually a really important part of my health and the treatment alternatives that I had at the time, but also just to detecting a kind of cancer that is more rare and tends to be more aggressive at a relatively early stage. That is really important for anyone who is faced with a challenging diagnosis or a cancer diagnosis.
Hansen-White:
Self empowerment?
Knudson:
Self advocacy, listening to your own sense of what is right, but also checking in right away when you notice that something is wrong. It takes a little while in our system to even get access to care once you've decided that you need care, especially diagnostic screening. So initiating that process as soon as you think,’ I need to go and see someone about something’ is really important, and that's a part of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is actually reminding people that screenings and self exams for breast cancer, these are really important parts of finding anomalies early and then making sure that you have access to as many treatment options and as much health in the future as possible.
Hansen-White:
I think that awareness now is hopefully a little better than it was 17 years ago. Do you feel like this time it was a different experience with just more doctors and more people are aware of breast cancer in the different ways it can look?
Knudson:
Anytime you step into that realm of medical expertise, what different doctors and researchers and nurses and all of the different special specialist practitioners that you engage with, they bring an extraordinary level of education and insight and experience to those moments.
But, what is amazing about having breast cancer 17 years ago and then again in 2025 is for 17 years I've listened to research stories and articles on KLCC or on NPR. I've read about them in newspapers about so many advances that have been made in terms of treatment options and, really effective targeted treatment for different types of cancer. The way that medical research has evolved to be able to give people access to better care, more targeted care, is really extraordinary. It's profound.
I always found those to be very encouraging reports, because you never know what your dear people will face in the future, your friends or your own family. Knowing that we are continuing to pursue and develop treatment options is incredibly important. I feel really strongly about the importance of science-based treatment and great medical research continuing in our country and being available to people around the world.
I feel really strongly about people having access to health insurance and health care, because I've experienced being a young person who was just a few months into my coverage through my professional work. I'd had health insurance in graduate school as I was a research fellow and a teaching fellow in graduate school. I was just a few months into my health insurance coverage as a young professional when I had my first instance of breast cancer. What you know as a person who's working an hourly wage job and earning overtime to cover your costs and your student loans and your fixed responsibilities within your life, is that a diagnostic test that costs $500, not having health insurance to cover that is a huge barrier.
There are a lot of people in our country and in our community who need access to affordable health insurance and health care, and we have to stay focused on that, because it does make a huge difference in terms of health outcomes, if people are able to intervene early, and, you know, have a much better course of treatment and a much higher likelihood of success with their treatment.
Hansen-White:
When you're thinking about that, are you thinking about the cuts to Medicaid?
Knudson:
I think our current trajectory of disinvestment in access to health care and in health care coverage for all Americans, I really feel, without question, that we're moving in the wrong direction. We should have more coverage, not less coverage. We should have better affordability, not the prospect of people's premiums increasing by 75% when we get to the other side of some of this brinksmanship with our country's current leadership.
Those are decisions at an abstract policy level that land with people on the ground in our communities, and that I just don't think that we should have any argument about the need for every person to have access to the health care that they need. Now we are all going to need different types of health care throughout the courses of our lives. Other than my experiences with breast cancer, I have needed very little access to health care in my entire life, but that absolutely doesn't mean that I didn't need access to great care and insurance in order to be able to navigate this really difficult experience. I'm looking into a future and towards a future where we get refocused on that outcome, because it's foundational to quality of life for everyone in Eugene, everyone in our community, in Lane County, and everyone in this entire country.
Hansen-White:
You have been facing this privately, but you've also been leading city council meetings and on the dais where there's some tough conversations happening at City Hall. How has it been to balance those two things?
Knudson:
This has been a lot to balance. I will say that stepping into the mayor's office and taking my oath of office just a few days after noticing what turned out to be breast cancer in January, there were moments of just trying to imagine the logistical aspects of what was ahead that were really challenging. But, what I will say is that I never wavered in terms of my commitments and my certainty that I would be able to get through this experience, to go through my treatment, that I would have the loving support of my husband and my daughters and my dearest friends. So many loving thermoses of soup delivered to our family the weeks when I had treatment that were just expressions of love, right? Those really helped.
Stepping into the mayor's responsibility, this is more than a full time job, to meet the needs of our community and the responsibilities that go along with the type of leadership we assigned to our mayor in Eugene. So, I had to do some work early on to figure out how I was going to be able to schedule my treatments. Chemotherapy was on Fridays, three three weeks on, and then one week off. That meant that I was able to avoid any conflicts with our public meetings that are on Mondays and Wednesdays. It meant that I was able to avoid any conflicts with the new lecture course that I'd agreed to teach in our community and regional planning program. That was important to me. It's important to me always that we don't box people into a single identity. I'm very motivated towards action. I'm very biased towards action, and I'm very biased towards hope, which is always connected to taking action.
That for me meant organizing my week and project managing my own healthcare needs with my responsibilities as the mayor, and then just sticking with that plan. And any good plan, you're going to adapt if you need to. I was fortunate in that conversations that I had with our city manager to essentially say, ‘I'm just going to be charging ahead and keep on, keeping on with my plans for what's ahead of us.’ And, we had a lot of work to do in the winter and the spring and the summer.
I mean, there were some major community issues that needed the mayor to be present in order for us to find a path forward. I was just committed to that. And I did share with Sarah Medari and our closest executive team members that if I needed to change my schedule, if I needed to adapt, I would. That's also a part of carrying this responsibility, and I have great confidence in others to step up and be present as needed.
But, my approach was just, this is going to be difficult, but people navigate really difficult things all the time. This is not the hardest thing I've had to navigate in my life, and I'm just going to keep planning for the future, and I'm not going to let this, this circumstance, distract me from how excited I am about all of the other things that we're working on in this community.
Hansen-White:
I also wanted to ask now that you are on the other side, are there any lessons from the last 10 months of being mayor, and these experiences that you might say, I wish I could tell myself this in January?
Knudson:
I'm really proud that I've been able to not even just sort of keep even keel with what I had planned and hoped for in this first year, but actually reach out and stretch beyond that. So there are some international leadership opportunities that our city is now engaged with through some essentially grant writing work that I did last winter that I think is really important to how we're going to grow as a city. And, sort of a value of continuous improvement and continuous learning. And I'm feeling really good about all of that.
There isn't anything that I'm looking back on at this point and feeling like, Oh, I wish I had known, you know, I would have done that really differently, because I feel really fortunate. I know it's been a difficult thing to navigate, but, again, I've had the opportunity to carry on with the work that I think is important, and build a lot of connections and build relationships with people all over our community. At a time when it would have been okay had people known that I was dealing with cancer and was in treatment for that, but I also feel really privileged to have had the chance to make those connections without that other layer of concern or or distraction.
I'm feeling a lot of gratitude for my health. I'm feeling an incredible appreciation for our community and my dearest people and all of their support. And then, probably like always, I am really excited about the work that we're going to do.
We have to continue being a place and a community that models the way, like we have to be a good example in the world. We have to keep lifting each other up and looking for connections and showing that it's possible to overcome division and difficulty. We can't afford to get stuck and centered on just one thing, we have to keep looking for ways to lift each other up and help to navigate our broader community through a really, really difficult time. A lot of that has to do with being able to, you know, maintain your composure in the face of something that's going to be really challenging, and then just keep looking for each step that you can take that's going to be positive on the way to that bigger goal. Feel yourself making progress, feel your community making progress and then, you know, at some point, be able to look back and feel really proud and really grateful that you were able to navigate that difficult thing.
I see a lot of connections between what I've been navigating personally and what we are navigating, I think more broadly in community right now. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by by circumstances that are beyond your control and that aren't what you would like for them to be, but it's equally easy to keep your attention focused on what you can do and how you can have agency and be a good example and and stay engaged with this incredible project we have of being a community. And yeah, it's probably obvious from the sound of my voice, I'm really excited about where we're going in the future, but not because it's easy
