Sydney Towle, in her own words, was a healthy and active individual till one day in May 2023, she noticed a protruding bump from her abdomen. While she had initially thought that it was hernia, when she visited the doctors, after tests it turned out that she had bile duct cancer.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Sydney talked about the doctors’ reaction to her issue. She mentioned, “They were like, ‘Yeah, this is cancerous. We don’t know what type yet, so you’re going to need a biopsy and a lot more testing.”
Eventually, she was diagnosed with bile duct cancer or cholangiocarcinoma, which is not only an aggressive and rare form of cancer but also affects mostly people over 50 years of age.
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In the same interview, Sydney said, “I don’t fit any of the demographic factors. It’s usually found in people with other health issues, or older individuals with a history of hepatitis. That’s why my oncologist is repeating tests and doing another biopsy — just to make absolutely sure. It’s extremely rare in someone my age.”
While the results were surprising, they did not entirely shock Sydney as she had a feeling that she was perhaps going to get diagnosed with cancer.
She said, “We all know our bodies pretty well. And when this started happening, I just had a feeling. When I went in for the ultrasound and they found the solid mass, I told myself, ‘Honestly, yeah, I’m just going to have to accept that this is probably cancer.’ So when they actually said it, I wasn’t really shocked.”
That very day, she posted about this on Tiktok since she shares almost everything on the social media platform and given how big of a development this was, she had to share it with her followers and other people.
Following her update, she received tons of solidarity messages, especially from people who had first hand experience with cancer or had seen a loved one go through it.
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Her social media followers count also increased and she continues to share her journey on both Instagram and Tiktok. She told PEOPLE, “From that point, it became so helpful for me to connect with others. And to hear that my honesty was helping people — it gave me a purpose. 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.’ Just knowing that being vulnerable and real about cancer is making a difference — that’s been huge for me.”
She further added, “I am just trying to take it day by day and hoping for the best in every scenario, and trying to just put my best foot forward and do whatever the doctors tell me to do. I’m obviously hoping that I am not part of the statistics that I read online.”
Sydney’s treatment began immediately in Los Angeles after her diagnosis and she had to start chemotherapy because her tumor in her liver had reached an unusual size of 11 cm. She underwent both immunotherapy and chemotherapy and after five months of treatment she was able to go for surgery.
Sydney had her liver resection, her gallbladder removed and several abdominal lymph nodes taken out in January 2024. As reported by PEOPLE, “The plan was to resume chemotherapy afterward but a combination of positive margins (residual cancer cells) and a white blood cell count that never rebounded prevented her from continuing.”
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She then eventually relocated to New York to continue her treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Talking about how she posts everything on social media and wants to use the platform to raise awareness and help people, Sydney said, “People will comment things like, ‘You can’t have cancer — you still have your hair,’ or ‘You don’t look sick. That’s been really hard. It’s painful when people question something so real just because it doesn’t match their idea of what illness looks like.”
She added, “Honestly, before going through this, I also had preconceived notions about what cancer looked like,” Towle adds. “I thought most people with cancer lost their hair, or that you’d always look really sick or weak. So I understand where some of that comes from.”
She then said that she hoped that through her journey that she documents online, people understand that not every struggle, even one as massive as cancer, is always visible on one’s body. However, that does not mean that the person is not struggling.
