A singer with cancer wrote a final tune for her 7-year-old son — and people on TikTok made it go viral as her dying wish.
"I’m just honestly so blown away by everyone’s love and how they’ve supported me through this and shared this story," Cat Janice, 31, says of her new song "Dance You Outta My Head" in an interview with TODAY.com. "I really wasn’t expecting to be here. I really do believe it’s a miracle to be able to witness this. I'm just very happy to be here."
In November 2021, Janice, who lives in Virginia with her 7-year-old son Loren, felt a lump in her neck.
"I had just gotten over COVID so my lymph nodes were really swollen so ... I didn't think anything of it," she said in a 2022 TikTok video titled "My hypochondria saved me."
Janice explained, "Fast-forward to March of 2022 ... I was studying for an exam and when I'm anxious I kind of rub my neck ... and I noticed the lump was still there."
The lump, Janice said, was bigger and very hard.
"It did not move and it did not hurt," she said, adding that she had no other symptoms and had normal bloodwork, having struggled with long-haul COVID. Otherwise, Janice had "constant" tight knots on her back, under her shoulder blades.
"It turns out later that the tumor was actually in my scalene muscle," she said, adding, "Long story short, I ended up with this really random, weird rare tumor ... I never would have noticed if I hadn't have been anxiously rubbing my neck."
Janice was diagnosed with sarcoma, which according to Cleveland Clinic is a type of cancerous tumor that develops in the bones or soft tissue, such as cartilage, tendons and nerves.
"(Doctors said) it was not a very good prognosis but (they) would do the best that they can," Janice tells TODAY.com.
"(My son) was so young when I was first diagnosed so we didn't really talk about it," she says. "He's a little bit older now and can understand more but it's always been, 'Mommy is sick but she's fighting and working to beat it.' Now, he understands ... that Mommy is very ill and very much potentially not going to make it."
The mom went through radiation and chemotherapy and removed the lump in her neck, however in May 2023, the cancer returned in her lungs.
The next month, Janice told her followers.
"Just found out a couple weeks ago and I've been processing it," she said on TikTok. "But it's back and it's on my lungs."
Janice's latest song is "Dance You Outta My Head" which, she tells TODAY.com, is about "Feeling yourself, you're at the top of your mood. You're out on the town and maybe there's ... somebody you got a crush on, but you're not thinking about it tonight because tonight is about you."
On Jan. 10, Janice told TikTok that she was in hospice.
"Don't know my timeline," she captioned the video. "Tumors tripled basically overnight."
Janice explained in another TikTok video this month, "I changed all the rights of my songs to my son so I can leave him behind something ... I might not be here but my baby boy will be."
Her song took off on TikTok.
"Cancer sucks. I lost my mom to it when I was pregnant with my son ... and this kind of thing would have lifted our spirits," one woman captioned her video.
"I was once a 7-year-old who lost their mom to cancer," wrote someone else. "Dancing to spread this song."
"As a mama who was diagnosed with cancer and now in remission, my heart broke when I heard that the mama who wrote this song is dying because of cancer and has left the rights to her 7-year-old son," wrote a mom.
Last week, Janice shared how people’s efforts boosted her song to success.
She captioned a TikTok video. “I woke up in the middle of the night to finding out the song is CHARTING Apple ITUNES as now #5 in the WORLD and #1 in multiple countries ... THANK YOU WORLD FOR LOVING MY SON AND I SO MUCH!!!!”
As Janice tells TODAY.com, “It’s so beautiful and wonderful and amazing.”