Jael Strauss, former America’s Next Top Model contestant, had died just two months after she was diagnosed with “incurable” breast cancer.
According TMZ, Jael died at around 11 a.m. Tuesday, after taking a turn for the worse Monday night. Jael was reportedly in hospice care at the time—according to a recent Facebook post from Jael, the 34-year-old had been in hospice care since Thanksgiving. TMZ reports she also stopped chemotherapy around that time.
Jael revealed in October that she had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer, a rare and very aggressive form of cancer, via Facebook post.
“It has aggressively spread throughout my body and is incurable,” she wrote. “With treatment, it may prolong my life a longer than the ‘few months’ doctors said I could make it. I don’t want to die. I need another one of those miracles that I got back in 2013,” likely referring to an intervention in 2013 that led to her sobriety, according to People.
Jael had inflammatory breast cancer—a rare and “very aggressive” form of cancer where cancer cells block a person’s lymph vessels in the skin of the breast, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). It’s called “inflammatory” because the breast will usually look swollen and red.
While, again, this type of cancer is very rare—it accounts for just 1 to 5 percent of all diagnosed breast cancers in the U.S.—it moves quickly, and is usually either stage III or IV when it’s diagnosed.
To help cover the cost of her treatment, Jael’s friends created a GoFundMe page that raised more than $18,000 of a $30,000 goal—a gesture which her friends and family were glad she got to see, reports TMZ. “The one blessing was that we were able to show her how loved she was before she passed. She brought so much light to people,” said Jael’s friends and family in a statement to the news site.
Jael also thanked those who donated on her Facebook page in early October: “The outpouring of love is overwhelming to say the least,” she wrote. “But I’m fighting, to live another day and ain’t nothing gonna get in my way.”
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