Richard Thoma loves his life. He’s young and recently married; he’s a marathon runner, hiker, and traveler. And he loves his job at Securian Financial as regional vice president, Southwest region, and the life insurance products that he and his team sell. But they are products that he can never buy, even though he’s just 32 years old.
Richard has spent the past three years battling appendix cancer, an extremely rare cancer that affects just one to two people out of every 1 million each year, significantly less than even 1% of the population.
The gift of life insurance
Richard is now cancer free, but his cancer history makes him ineligible to buy life insurance. Luckily, he has a small, permanent policy he bought before he got married.
“I've got as much life insurance as I'll ever be able to get, and I wish I had way more,” he said. “They always say ‘with life insurance, the moment you want it the most, you can't get it anymore.’”
The call that changed his life
On September 12, 2023, when Richard was in Houston for business, he received a call from his primary care physician telling him that he had cancer of the appendix, that he would be on chemotherapy for the rest of his life and that his life would never be the same.
“We were in absolute shock. I immediately booked a flight back home, and we started the medical journey from there,” Richard explained.
Ashley, Richard’s wife, said she initially had feelings of hopelessness, shock, and grief. “And then, I was like “Okay, what are we going to do? How do we fix this?”
His diagnosis came after months of not feeling well, lack of energy, fatigue, and a protruding stomach. At Ashley’s insistence, he went to his primary care physician in July, which began a series of tests and finally a CAT scan that led to his diagnosis.
While his primary physician had a dire prognosis, they eventually found a specialist who treats this type of cancer and gave them encouraging news — that surgery was the best option, and he had a fighting chance.
Undergoing the mother of all surgeries
In October 2023, Richard underwent a14–hour CRS HIPEC surgery, short for cytoreductive surgery with heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy. “If you google it, it goes by the mother of all surgeries,” explained Richard.
It involved cutting him open from his sternum to his lower abdomen and scraping tumors from every individual organ. And what they couldn’t scrape, they removed – his appendix, gallbladder, spleen, omentum, peritoneal lining, and parts of his stomach, colon, small intestine, and rectum.
This was followed by heated chemotherapy delivered directly to the abdominal cavity to destroy any remaining cancer cells.
A second surgery followed in November 2024, where they repeated the CRS HIPEC surgery with less organ removal.
“I feel very fortunate to be sitting here today with a strong prognosis moving forward. But that doesn't mean that in the drop of a hat, a very healthy looking, engaged 29-year-old didn't completely have his life upended and my beautiful wife, she had her life completely upended that same day as well.”
It was a traumatic diagnosis, surgery and recovery, but Richard is well on his way to leading a normal and active life.
Preparing for the New York City marathon
Just two years from the initial diagnosis and a year from major surgery, Richard is cancer free and training for the New York City Marathon in November. “My goal is to finish and that’s where I am these days. It will be my slowest marathon so far but my most fulfilling.”
Richard has always enjoyed running. It’s his time for solitude and reflection, but Ashely was concerned about him taking on this challenging endeavor so soon after surgery.
“He told me ‘I didn’t fight this hard not to live my life,’” she said. “And how do you argue with that?”
For this marathon – his fourth – he'll be running for Fred’s Team, Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center’s running program that gives runners the opportunity to raise money for life-saving cancer research at MSK.̶̶
Putting life and life insurance in perspective
Richard is grateful for his recovery and that he works for a company that has a supportive culture and “went above and beyond” in supporting him during his illness and recovery. “I really feel like it's a family, and they've supported me just like my family has,” Richard said.
And he takes life in stride. “I don't take anything personally anymore. I'm simply happy to be here, and I appreciate the ability to be here, and I want to just keep being able to do what I want to do,” he said.
“And I want to keep reminding people that insurability is a gift. At some point in everybody's life, they're going to be completely uninsurable. For the lucky ones, it happens when they're 85-90 years old. But for some people that happens when they're just 29.”
