After months of wrong diagnoses, a BEAUTY influencer with two kids died of cancer.
Before she died so suddenly, 36-year-old YouTuber Jessica Pettway told sad stories about how her illness affected her husband and young children.
An Instagram post seen by E! News says that Pettway’s sister Reyni Brown confirmed on Friday that her sister had died on March 11. She also said that her “heart had never felt pain like this.”
Brown said that Pettway’s advice made her sister a better mother and that her sister was amazing, strong, and sure of herself.
“Life will never be the same without her crazy laugh, pranks, or jokes,” said Brown.
“When we lose a sibling, it’s like a link between us was cut off.” I totally love you.”
For her lifestyle posts about hair, fashion, and beauty, Pettway gained hundreds of thousands of followers across many social media sites.
The influencer from California shared a lot of pictures of her husband and their two daughters. The girls also had a lot of fans of their own.
But over the last few years, Pettway’s posting schedule has become less regular, and her fans have noticed that she won’t post anything on Instagram for months at a time.
Some of her followers left comments on her posts, asking if she was okay and if her kids were okay.
“Hi there, girl!” Just a quick note. As of almost a year ago, one fan wrote, “I hope everything is okay.”
Someone else wrote, “Hope you’re doing well; I thought of you today.”
SIGNAL OF SHOCK
The following July, 2023, Pettway said that she had been told she had stage 3 cancer, one year after she almost died from bleeding.
Her husband found her passed out from “intense vaginal bleeding” in July 2022, and she was taken to the hospital, she wrote in her post from last year.
The doctor told her that the bleeding was caused by fibroids, which are muscle growths that can happen on the uterus wall.
With treatment, Pettway was able to stop the bleeding, but she was still so weak and in so much pain that she said it felt like giving birth.
“I accepted this as a ‘normal’ symptom that most women go through,” it was said.
In January of the next year, Pettway tried to have surgery on her fibroids but was injured and couldn’t.
She had several blood transfusions while she was there, and the doctor told her to see an oncologist.
After a biopsy in February, she was told she had stage 3 cervical cancer.
What fans thought about the news was shocking, and they wondered if Pettway’s caretakers weren’t taking her seriously, even though she almost died.
However, Pettway said she had faith in the future and that it grew stronger as she began treatment.
MEMORIES OF JESSICA
A few days after telling everyone about her health, Pettway told more scary stories about how her problems had hurt her family.
She wrote in the caption of an Instagram picture of her family smiling, “The girls are too young to understand, but they saw the changes.”
The girls would ask Pettway’s husband, “When is mommy coming home?” Moreover, “How come mommy keeps going in the ambulance truck?” During her rough treatments, she said.
“Being wheeled into the ambulance and waving bye to my kids, only to see them crying for their mommy to stay home, broke me,” she wrote in the picture.
“And watching my husband break down in tears, was rough.”
In her last sentence, Pettway said something positive again: she and her husband were leaning on each other through it.
In the now-sad post, she said, “The blessing we’ve been waiting for will blow our minds.”
Pettway, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, soon after posting that update said she was moving back to Georgia to be with her family.
The writer wrote, “I so needed this.”
This status update was the last thing she posted on Instagram.
According to her death notice, Pettway passed away at a hospice in Griffin, Georgia, which is an hour south of Atlanta.
