Letícia Siqueira Oliveira, a physiotherapist from the Santo Antônio da Platina district of Brazil, initially attributed her symptoms to food intolerance. Later, doctors diagnosed her with advanced colon cancer. The influencer, who dedicated herself to cancer awareness and initially underestimated her own symptoms, has tragically died at the age of 31. Letícia Siqueira Oliveira was young and fit before her diagnosis. She subsequently documented her experiences on social networks, where she courageously fought the disease, reports the daily.
On March 17, Leticia’s friend confirmed her death in a video shared with hundreds of thousands of followers. Fighting back tears, the friend said sad words in the video. “Last October, when Lê started withdrawing from social networks right before the high-risk surgery, she asked me to take her phone and make a video if she didn’t survive the surgery. I never thought this day would come, but it did,” she lamented.
Leticia, whom her friends called Lê, was 28 years old when she first felt a sudden urge to go to the toilet, but when she got there, nothing happened. She thought it might be a food intolerance or stress. With so much going on in her life like her master’s degree, house renovations, buying an apartment, and wedding preparations, she ignored her body’s warning signals. For at least five months, she tried to control the symptoms on her own with probiotics, medication and dietary changes.
She was a young and fit physiotherapist with no previous medical history. She never thought it could be anything serious. It was only when more obvious symptoms such as abdominal swelling, pain and traces of blood in the stools appeared that she began to suspect a bowel problem.
Even then, however, she postponed the visit to the doctor. When she finally sought medical attention, doctors found an advanced tumor in her intestine with metastases to her ovaries and abdomen. Leticia underwent major surgery, including the removal of part of her bowel, reproductive organs and lymph nodes, and began chemotherapy, using a colostomy bag (ostomy) during her recovery.
In March of last year, she shared an open letter to her ostomy. “If there was a moment when I really realized the seriousness of everything, it was when I woke up with an exposed piece of intestine with a huge incision, a drain, with some organs and a few pounds lighter. That’s when I lost any positive ideas about what I was going through. That’s when I understood that my life could hang in the balance. And ironically, it was at that moment that I was reborn. Having an ostomy forced me to learn from scratch to do something we all did automatically without thinking, without fear,” she wrote.
“The disease has made me furious many times in those 16 months, but I can’t deny that it has taught me that I can live well and happily even though I am different,” she concluded. Letícia already received palliative care at the age of 30. After marrying her fiance last March, she told local media that she was fully aware of her situation, but she also has a need to live. She said yes to everything: trips, outings, concerts, invitations from friends. She couldn’t live just for the treatment.
