Beauty influencer Jessica Pettway dies of cancer at age 36

US News

By Snejana Farberov

Beauty influencer Jessica Pettway died from complications of stage 3 cervical cancer, which she said was initially misdiagnosed. She was 36 years old.

The married mother of two succumbed on Wednesday of last week, her sister Reyni confirmed in a now private Instagram post. shared by E! Online.

“Today is my birthday and the only thing I could wish for is for God to bring you back to this earth,” Reyni wrote on Friday with a photo of her and Jessica.

“I lost my beautiful big sister 2 days ago and my heart has never felt pain like this.”

Pettway, who called herself “The Bohemian of Compton,” is survived by her husband of 12 years, Michael, and her daughters, Kailee, 10, and Zoi Lee, 3. Essence reported.

Pettway’s death comes nearly nine months after the online beauty guru first revealed her cancer diagnosis in an Instagram post to her 152,000 followers.

“I was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. I don’t even know where to start, but I want to share why I’ve been away for so long, in the hopes that at least one person will be encouraged by my story,” he wrote in July 2023.

Pettway said it started as “heavy vaginal bleeding” in June 2022. She talked to other women about her symptoms and was led to believe that what was happening to her was “normal.”

When she went to the hospital after passing out in her bathroom at home due to extreme blood loss, Pettway said she was diagnosed with “fibroids.” described by the Mayo Clinic as “common growths of the uterus” that “are not cancer and almost never become cancer.”

But the bleeding persisted and led to another hospitalization, during which Pettway said “medical professionals treated it like it wasn’t that alarming since it was just a ‘fibroid.'”

The bleeding eventually stopped, only to be replaced by what the influencer described as “childbirth-like pains.”

Another trip to the hospital followed in early January 2023 after the bleeding came back “and it wouldn’t stop,” he said.

After Pettway spent a week in the hospital and underwent 10 blood transfusions, she said doctors recommended she make an appointment with an oncologist and undergo a biopsy.

“On February 8, 2023, I had an outpatient biopsy,” Pettway said. “When I woke up from anesthesia, he casually told me, ‘Yes, you have stage 3 cervical cancer.’ Turns out it wasn’t a fibroid, but cancer. “I was misdiagnosed this whole time.”

“I remember hearing that and immediately saying to myself, ‘I refuse to come to terms with that diagnosis.’ And then I didn’t. Being told I have cancer didn’t devastate me. It was the reaction of my loved ones,” he added.

In a post from August 2023The mother of two described in heartbreaking detail how her health crisis has affected her family.

“The girls are too young to understand it, but they noticed the changes. They often asked, ‘When will mom come home?’ Or ‘How come Mom is still riding in the ambulance?’” Pettway wrote:

“I was devastated when they took me to the ambulance and I waved goodbye to my children, only to see them crying asking their mother to stay home. And seeing my husband break down in tears was hard,” she continued.

Pettway wrote that she and her family “moved on and did everything they could to not let the current circumstances get the better of us. It definitely wasn’t easy, but we got here!”

Pettway leaves a legacy of hundreds of YouTube videos with millions of views on his popular channel that still has 228,000 subscribers.