YouTuber Tess Christine Shares Breast Cancer Diagnosis

YouTuber Tess Christine is hoping to help others by sharing her breast cancer journey.

“I was diagnosed with breast cancer in the beginning of March,” the social media personality, 30, announced on her YouTube channel April 21, “very very suddenly and what felt like out of nowhere.”

In January—after she, her husband Patrick and their 10-month-old son Theo returned home to New York from a visit to Minnesota—Tess found a lump in her left breast. Initially, she “didn’t really think anything of it,” she said, assuming it was a clogged milk duct or change in her body from starting to wean from breastfeeding.

But the lump didn’t go away. And after Tess woke up with what she described as “throbbing pain” in her left breast at the beginning of her menstrual cycle, she decided to go in for a checkup. 

Though her primary care doctor thought the lump was a cyst, “I still just had this gut-wrenching feeling that something was wrong,” the vlogger shared with her 2.32 million subscribers, “and I just kept thinking the worst. And maybe that was because I had Theo and I was just like ‘Oh my god, I can’t have cancer. I have this new baby who needs me.'”