Beauty and fashion influencer Jessica Pettway died at the age of 36 due to cancer. This comes almost nine months after she revealed that she had been diagnosed with stage three cervical cancer, as per a report in People Magazine. The social media personality was a mother to two daughters. She died on March 11 at a hospice centre in Georgia, United States, according to her obituary.
Ms Pettway joined YouTube in November 2013 and had around 3 lakh followers with 450 videos on her channel.
She revealed in July last year that she had been misdiagnosed with fibroids initially. As per Mayo Clinic, fibroids are "common growths of the uterus". "I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. I don't even know where to begin, but I want to share why I've been gone for so long, in hopes that at least one person is encouraged by my story," she wrote in the post.
She said that she had intense vaginal bleeding in 2022. During her hospital hospitalisations from July 2022 to January 2023, Ms Pettway got the same diagnosis from doctors. However, in February 2023, she visited an oncologist who discovered a "huge mass" covering her cervix after performing a biopsy.
"On Feb. 8th, 2023, he performed an outpatient biopsy on me. When I woke up from the anesthesia, he casually said, 'Yep you have stage 3 cervical cancer.' It turns out, it was not a fibroid, but cancer. I was misdiagnosed all this time," wrote Ms Pettway.
She continued, "I remember hearing that and immediately saying to myself, 'I refuse to make an agreement with that diagnosis.' And so I didn't. Being told I have cancer didn't devastate me. It was the reaction of those close to me."
In another post, she wrote alongside her family picture that an illness "also changes the lives of those closest to you". "From the countless hospital stays. To the financial strain. We been through it all! The girls are too young to understand, yet they noticed the changes. They would often ask, 'when is mommy coming home?" Or 'how come mommy keeps going in the ambulance truck?' Being wheeled into the ambulance and waving bye to my kids, only to see them crying for their mommy to stay home, broke me. And watching my husband break down in tears, was rough," the influencer added.
"We moved forward and did our best not to allow current circumstances to overtake us. It was definitely not easy, but we made it this far," Ms Pettway said.
Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women which is caused by the abnormal growth cells in a woman's cervix or the entrance to the uterus from the vagina, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). An estimated 604,000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer across the world in 2020 and around 342, 000 died from the disease. While common, cervical cancer is also one of the most treatable forms of cancer if detected early. In later stages, the disease can be controlled through proper treatment.
