Tiktok Star Sydney Towle Has Died at 26 After Entering Hospice Earlier This Week
A doctor told her to start end-of-life care. She fired him, found a new specialist, and days later walked a Miami runway in swimwear made for bodies that survived cancer.
Sydney Towle was 23 when she found a large bump protruding from her abdomen and got a diagnosis her own body wasn’t supposed to get: stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma, a bile duct cancer that mostly hits people over 50. “I don’t fit any of the demographic factors,” she told PEOPLE.
She spent the next three years documenting all of it for more than 1 million TikTok followers: several surgeries, multiple clinical trials, round after round of chemo. In recent months she’d been in a trial for TIL therapy, an immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells to attack the cancer.
In May 2026 her cancer spread to her peritoneum, the lining of the abdomen and pelvis. Two days later she said her oncologist refused to keep treating her and pushed her toward hospice. She switched doctors instead.
Then she flew to Florida for Miami Swim Week and modeled in The Chemo Club x Post Swim show alongside three other women in or past cancer treatment. “I’ve struggled a lot with a post-surgical body, especially having this hepatic artery pump placed in my stomach that is very obvious when I’m in a bathing suit,” she said. “It makes me feel even more proud to be in the body that I am that has carried me through so much.”
Even as strangers filled her comments with predictions about how little time she had left, she kept choosing the other read. “People always ask why I’m so positive, and it’s like, why would I not envision the best-case scenario, the best way of things working out?” she said in a June 28 video. “The alternative is to not do that and to just be sad.” She reminded her followers that “miracles happen every day.”
Her final post came July 23, after Royel Otis dedicated a song to her live. “Sad to have missed it but so happy it happened,” she wrote, adding that “it’s so hard to type but I’m trying my bets [sic].”
On Aug. 4, her brother Austin posted a photo of her hospital bed ringed by family and friends and announced she’d been moved to hospice, thanking her followers for their support. Towle died the next day, on Wednesday, Aug. 5. Her family announced it a day later on her social media pages. “I am so proud of how hard you fought,” the post read. Austin shared the same tribute, calling her the “best sister ever.”
“What’s really kept me going is the people who message me or even come up to me and say, ‘You’ve helped me so much,'” she told PEOPLE. “Just knowing that being vulnerable and real about cancer is making a difference, that’s been huge for me.”
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