Tests, diagnoses, treatments – a rare appendix cancer has been the harrowing battle that Katherine Berecic has been fighting, but through grit, hope and determination, is one she is looking to win.
When she was 31 years old, Kat underwent what was meant to be a routine surgery for appendicitis.
It was discovered then, however, that her appendix had burst, and doctors told her in 2021 that the mucous-producing tumour cells had spread through her abdomen.
“It was like a cancer bomb going off in my belly,” Kat told Star News in 2022.
Halfway through 2025, Kat’s mettle has been tested, but it has not waned.
She has undergone multiple lengthy surgeries, including heated chemotherapy poured directly into her abdomen, 100 rounds of traditional chemotherapy, and a trip to Japan for adoptive cell therapy – a treatment that has kept her cancer stable for two years.
In the second half of 2024, it again began to spread, prompting another 12-hour surgery in January of 2025.
There is no calm in Kat’s waters; initial treatment for her trip to Japan saw her exhaust her Super, selling her home, and sourcing funds through crowdfunding.
Building on her self-determination, it was the amount of encouragement and support that she received, not just from her family, but from strangers who had come across her story.
“It was just the will to keep on living; I’m a pretty shy person, and so having to put myself out there was the most difficult thing you could ever imagine,” she said.
“But, I knew that it was my only option, that, if I wasn’t able to raise money for these treatments, I was going to die.
“So it was either become vulnerable and put yourself out there, or die, and I know it sounds harsh, but those were my options.”
At the time of writing, Kat’s GoFundMe page is sitting at $200,503, just over halfway to the needed $400,000, and $59,750 to the goal of $250,000 on Rare Cancers Australia, for treatments in the United States, Germany and Japan.
Aside from her desire to keep on living, it’s simply love, love that serves as the fuel for her engine.
“I didn’t know my [initial] prognosis, because I never wanted to know,” Kat said.
“But based on others who have had this cancer, doctors have said I’m doing really well, that I’m truly an outlier.
“They told me to keep doing what I’m doing because it’s clearly working,” she said.
Life for Kat had taken a rather drastic turn in the last four years, where if the days were not filled with treatments and appointments, they were instead with endless hours of research for treatments available around the globe.
Laughing for seemingly sounding like a broken record, and for the lack of a better word, Kat said that there is no escaping the fact that it was, and is, nothing but love that is pushing her to keep going forward.
This is especially the case when it comes to Kat’s mental fortitude; there is no questioning her physical prowess, the countless treatments and surgeries she has undergone are a testimony to that.
However, Kat has recognised “how important the mind is in recovery”.
“Once you start going downhill mentally, it’s a really slippery slope that I won’t be able to get back from.
“But honestly, I believed that from day one, I’ve been surrounded by so much love, and just so much support.
“You can see that on the GoFundMe page and my Instagram, I’m constantly showered in love, and I truly, truly believe that that’s what’s gotten me through.
“I feel like these people have given me so much that I owe it to them to do the absolute best that I can do.”
Currently, Kat is self-funding an immunotherapy drug that costs $3000 per three weeks, which would normally be PBS funded for more common cancers.
After speaking to doctors and researchers from around the world, her options moving forward include histotripsy, a recent breakthrough in cancer treatment that was recently approved in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration in 2023.
Since not widely available, this would see Kat travelling States-bound to De Kevin Burns, a leading interventional radiologist who has the potential to eradicate the liver tumour in Kat’s arteries.
Transarterial chemoembolisation, or TACE for short, is another option, serving as a targeted treatment that delivers chemo directly into the tumour to kill or stop it from moving, and while a version exists here in Australia, a more developed treatment plan is possible in Germany.
The third option is dendritic cell therapy in Japan, which has since progressed significantly after her last visit.
Recalling the time when Kat and her family decided to do crowdfunding for the initial trip to Japan, she said that she was just “blown away”.
“I was just overwhelmed, and it was the most beautiful, beautiful feeling, it just felt like everyone had my back,” she said.
Having been diagnosed in 2021, there is no question that the ‘norm’ in Kat’s life has been uprooted, and, while she sees herself as mostly a positive person, there are times when it simply catches up to her.
“It’s those times where the fear sets in and the sadness, just, it just comes around, you know?” she said.
“But then again, I get pulled out of that trance so quickly because there is just so much love around me.
“I’m also just so hopeful of those treatments, and I have so much confidence in them because of the research that I’ve done, the people around me, and the other patients who I’ve spoken to who have been on death’s door but had amazing results.
“I have that confidence, and even if they don’t work, there’s going to be something else; there are always options.”
For more information on Kat’s GoFundMe page, visit www.gofundme.com/f/for-our-girl-kat?lang=en_US
