Sydney Towle

Sydney Elizabeth Towle was born on November 15, 1999, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Elizabeth Morrow and Philip Towle. She grew up with her older brother, Austin, in Hobe Sound, Florida, a coastal town she called her favorite place. At South Fork High School she was a cross country runner, and she graduated in 2018. Her father died in 2016, and she later wrote about grief and loss "in honor of my dad and those who we have lost along the way" on her Substack.

Towle attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she studied government and environmental studies. She was involved with the college's Sustainability Office and the Alpha Phi sorority and wrote as an opinion columnist for the student newspaper, The Dartmouth. She graduated with the class of 2022. She also earned a yoga teaching certification after college.

Towle began posting on TikTok during her sophomore year at Dartmouth, building a following with dance trends, lip syncing, fashion, swimwear and travel videos. After graduating she lived in Los Angeles, worked a remote marketing job and kept posting about running, surfing and daily life.

After her cancer diagnosis in August 2023 her channel became a running diary of life with stage 4 cholangiocarcinoma, mixing chemotherapy vlogs, scan results and hospital stays with get ready with me videos, dancing, travel and time with friends. Her TikTok @sydtowle grew from about 450,000 followers to more than 750,000 by early 2025 and more than 1.1 million by her death, with more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. She also posted longer videos on her YouTube channel and wrote a Substack newsletter, stoop thoughts, described as thoughts from a 20 something year old girl with rare cancer living in New York City.

She worked with beauty and lifestyle brands, spoke at the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation's 2025 annual conference and at The Business of Fashion's Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa, California, in June 2025, and modeled at Miami Swim Week in 2026.

In 2023, after a run while visiting Dartmouth, Towle noticed a lump on the right side of her abdomen. She thought it was an exercise induced hernia, and an urgent care doctor agreed but ordered an ultrasound just in case. It showed a solid mass of about 8 to 9 centimeters in her liver, and an MRI report she opened alone in a parking lot described likely carcinoma and multiple masses. She was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile ducts that usually affects people over 50.

Five months of chemotherapy and immunotherapy reduced the mass enough for surgery, which removed most of the tumor, but cancer remained along her liver. A few months later an MRI showed a lesion that doubled in size within a month. She moved to New York City to be treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and had a hepatic artery pump placed to send chemotherapy directly into her liver. In June 2025 she shared that her team had told her for the first time, "This isn't good."

In March 2026 scans showed growth in her liver tumors and lymph nodes, an enlarged spleen and ascites. In April 2026 a tumor was surgically removed. On May 17, 2026, she learned the cancer had spread to her peritoneum, and on May 19 she posted a video with her mother explaining that her oncologist would no longer treat her and had recommended end of life care. She refused, moved to a new hospital and continued a clinical trial of tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy. On June 8 she learned she had developed tumors in her lungs, and she had further surgery in late June and more chemotherapy and immunotherapy in July.

Towle lived in Los Angeles after college and later in New York City, where she moved to be near Memorial Sloan Kettering. She was very close to her mother, Elizabeth Morrow, who attended appointments with her and appears in many of her videos, and to her brother, Austin Towle, who shared updates on his own TikTok when she became too ill to post. In June 2026 she said it had become too difficult to live on her own and moved in with her mother. She loved running, surfing, scuba diving, yoga, travel and searching New York for the best matcha. In January 2026 she spoke openly about infertility caused by chemotherapy and her regret at not freezing her eggs before treatment.

Towle wanted her audience to see that living with cancer could look different from what people expected, and she urged self advocacy, especially for young patients whose symptoms are dismissed. She told The Dartmouth in February 2026 that people should "treat people with kindness and empathy" because "there are so many invisible illnesses." She described herself as stubbornly hopeful: "Nobody knows for sure what's going to happen; like, miracles happen every day." In her final full Substack essay, in May 2026, she wrote that accepting help "is not guilt or shame or feeling like a burden. It is love."

Towle brought unusual public attention to cholangiocarcinoma and to young adults with cancer. The Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation said she "had a keen sense of how sharing her life could help others" and used it to promote understanding of young adults facing cancer, the importance of research funding and the beauty of living in the moment. Her story was also widely cited as an example of online harassment of chronically ill creators. After her death her family created a fund to endow a scholarship at South Fork High School and place a bench bearing her name on the Dartmouth campus.

Towle was a featured patient speaker at the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation's 2025 annual conference (AC25) and a speaker at The Business of Fashion's Business of Beauty Global Forum in 2025. She was the subject of a front page profile in The New York Times in May 2025, and her death was covered by outlets including the Associated Press, BBC News, The Guardian, TODAY, PEOPLE and Entertainment Tonight. She received no formal awards that have been reported.

Beyond TikTok and Instagram, Towle kept a YouTube channel with vlogs such as "chemo vlog + 10 mile run?!" and "this is how it really feels to have cancer." She appeared on the Question Everything Podcast episode "Too Young for Cancer" and on Miranda McKeon's PINK 365 conversation about invisible illness and social media. Her Substack, stoop thoughts, ran essays from 2025 to May 2026 including "no eggs in my basket" on infertility, "a month without cancer," and "in sickness and in health: why accepting help is a symbol of love."

By early 2025 Towle was targeted by online groups who falsely claimed she was faking or exaggerating her cancer, often pointing to her upbeat lifestyle videos. Some contacted companies she partnered with and the cancer center where she was treated, and her GoFundMe for her mother, who had been laid off in federal job cuts, drew further attacks. Her cancer was confirmed by her doctors and reporting. She told The New York Times, "I'm not a television show that you're watching. I'm not a fake character. I'm a person."

After about a month in the hospital, Towle entered hospice care on August 4, 2026, as her brother announced with a photo of family and friends at her bedside. She died on August 5, 2026, at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, from complications of metastatic cholangiocarcinoma, aged 26. Her family announced her death on her Instagram and TikTok on August 6, calling her "an endless ray of sunshine. A daughter, sister, and friend to so many." In a video beside their mother, Austin Towle said, "Syd went peacefully last night after an almost three-year-long battle with cholangiocarcinoma." About two months later, in early October 2026, he scattered her ashes from a boat in Hobe Sound, Florida, writing that her spirit would live on in the place she loved most.