Logan Buraczynski was at her annual check-up in December when a nurse felt a bump in her throat. An ultrasound showed the mass was dense and required a biopsy, revealing that it was 70 to 80 percent positive for cancer cells.
“That was kind of hard to wrap my head around,” Buraczynski said.
Just a month before Buraczynski, a nurse educator at Lowell General Hospital, applied and received her bib number to run the 129th Boston Marathon.
“I’ve always wanted to run it and I actually suffered from some postpartum anxiety after my son was born,” Buraczynski said of her son, now 14 months.
Running helps clear the 31-year-old’s mind and she “doesn’t think” when she’s pounding the pavement.
Now, she’d have to think about the possibility of having cancer. The biopsied lump was sent to pathology, and the results came back as carcinoma or positive for thyroid cancer. That was in early January, and by the end of the same month, she had surgery to remove the mass, which was about half of her thyroid or a little smaller than a golf ball.
While Buraczynski didn’t notice the mass, she did have symptoms like a scratchy throat, difficulty sleeping, anxiety and hot flashes.
“To be honest, I just didn’t feel great,” she said. “I was exhausted, but it was just like a whole different level. Everything felt slightly off.”
Thyroid cancer symptoms can be vague and include a lump or mass in the neck, hoarseness or changes in voice, difficulty swallowing, cough, fatigue and weight loss or gain. Other symptoms include shortness of breath, flushing or redness in the face, tremors or anxiety and changes in bowel movements or diarrhea.
Surgeons found it was an encapsulated tumor in situ, meaning it’s a non-invasive cancer made up of abnormal cells that don’t spread.
At the time when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in January, she was training for her first marathon.
“I was like, you know what, I’m not going to not see this through,” she said. “I’ve always really been athletic, but I knew I didn’t want something like this to stop me from just running.”
She continued running and created the tagline “smile miles” to keep her motivated and running “one mile at a time with a smile.” She even had bracelets made with the “smile miles” tagline on them.
Following surgery, she had to take a few weeks off, but by the fourth week of her recovery, she returned to her training. She’ll be running with Team Tufts MC, and so far, she’s raised $5,212 of the $8,500 she needs.
The funds raised by Team Tufts MC support initiatives that build healthier communities, including critical medical equipment, research, patient support programs and community outreach efforts.
“Training for the Boston Marathon is for me, but the fundraising is for thousands of our patients and the community. I am one of those patients. If I can help one person, then I’m good.”
Logan Buraczynski
She initially began running to help her with postpartum anxiety after her son was born in February of 2024, which caused her to be “wound up tight all the time” with worry about things like whether her son was eating or sleeping enough.
“I just found that running was a great outlet,” she said. “It was really challenging for me, being a new mom; you don’t really know what you’re doing until you know what you’re doing. It just kind of fit into my life, and I took it and ran with it literally.”
Now she’s running up to 20 miles and has just weeks left to train.
