TikToker Maddy Baloy Dies at 26 After Battle With Cancer: ‘She Is So Special’
TikToker Maddy Baloy, who inspired millions by documenting her life with terminal cancer, has died at age 26.
"Madison passed away peacefully last night," her fiancé, Louis Risher, told People in a statement on Thursday, May 2. "She is so special. I turned 27 yesterday, actually. I was holding her hand all day and that’s all I needed."
Risher added that in her passing, Baloy was “surrounded with love.”
Baloy began regularly posting on TikTok after her diagnosis, telling People it was a time in which she felt "alone and isolated.”
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"I knew that I had a lot to say," she added. "Every single emotion while we're here because we're not going to be here for long.”
Baloy first began experiencing stomach issues in the summer of 2022 but believed she had some sort of stomach virus. After repeated changes to her diet failed to solve the problem, she finally sought medical attention in February 2023. By that point, she was vomiting blood and experiencing sensory issues.
Doctors performed emergency surgery after discovering “abnormalities” in her large intestine and later found multiple cancerous tumors pressing against the organ. She was told she had five years to live.
Baloy made it a point to fit as much life as she could into the time she had left. In one of her most viral videos on TikTok, she laid out her bucket list, which included everything from meeting Gordon Ramsay to getting a tattoo with her grandmother.
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As she later showed, Baloy accomplished plenty on the list. A post from February showed Baloy and Ramsay dancing, sharing a few hugs and laughing. Ramsay, 57, had invited her down to Miami for dinner at one of his Hell’s Kitchen locations.
“Thank you for teaching me to dance, it’s the first time ever in a kitchen ❤️,” Ramsay commented under the video.
Baloy also shared posts in which she crossed more items off her list, including reaching the summit of Camelback Mountain and writing “something good” — Baloy read a poem she composed in the desert.
In her final post, dated March 5, Baloy explained that she had not been able to take a bath in a year due to her colostomy bag. She was determined to take one more, however, and found an Airbnb with “the most beautiful bath that I have ever seen.”
“I hope, in your life, you get to take a thousand baths,” the text reads at the end of the video. “But in my life, I think this one can be enough.”
