26-year-old shares dire warning just 3 months before dying of melanoma: This could have been caught earlier
A young woman from Texas left an urgent warning before she died of melanoma last week.She hopes her story can save others.Alondra Sierra said she was just 19 when she noticed a freckle growing on her forehead.
No one told her it could be a problem.It went untreated for too long.“Now I live with stage four metastatic melanoma, fighting for my life every day, searching for treatments that might save me,” the 26-year-old said in a video posted for melanoma awareness month in May.Before she died, Sierra had undergone surgeries, immunology, radiation, and other therapies to try to keep her cancer at bay.“Skin cancer doesn’t care how young you are.
It doesn’t care how healthy you feel.It doesn’t wait.
So please listen: get uncomfortable.Get checked,” she said in the video.“You have to get your entire skin checked.
Because I don’t want your story to become like mine.”In 2019, SIerra noticed a freckle started to form on her forehead.The color changed from light to dark, she said in a TikTok video.Cancer didn’t even seem like a possibility to her.
It took three years before she learned she had melanoma.Melanoma is the most dangerous type of skin cancer because it grows quickly and can spread to other organs.It is the deadliest skin cancer, killing over 8,500 people in the US every year.It’s one of the most common cancers for young women under 30, and is becoming more common.By the time Sierra got her diagnosis in 2022, the cancer had “grown rapidly” and she tried several procedures and treatments to control the cancer.
“I probably wouldn’t have gone through so much if I had just seen a medical professional or a dermatologist for my yearly skin and nail check,” she said.In 2024, she learned the cancer had spread throughout her entire body, including her skull, pelvis, spine, ribs, back, stomach, she said.She started on immunotherapy, but in January, she said this “didn’t work.” In June, her family said she started doing radiation ...