Maddy Baloy Had Only 1 Year to Live After Cancer Diagnosis — and Chose Joy: 'Didn’t Let Anything Defy Her’

Maddy Baloy longed for adventure even surrounded by loved ones in the hospital at her home in Florida. “She kept saying, ‘I want to go out and swim,’” her fiance Louis Risher told PEOPLE in this week’s issue. This is how Baloy approached each day from the moment she was diagnosed with terminal cancer in February 2023 until the end of her life on May 2, 2024.

In just over a year, the 26-year-old has gained the admiration and support of millions who have followed her journey on TikTok as she worked her way through a 19-item list of skills to learn, people to meet and places to go. “Maddy didn’t let anything defy her,” says Risher, 27. “It was always just love.”

Baloy first began dealing with stomach issues during the summer of 2022, spending more than a year eliminating various foods from her diet. “I was really trying to work it out on my own,” she told PEOPLE in March. But on February 22, 2023, when the then-teacher at Shores Acres Elementary School in St. Petersburg began to constantly vomit and experience problems with her senses in the middle of class, she decided to go to urgent care.

Courtesy of Maddy Baloy

What resulted was emergency biopsy surgery and devastating news: Baloy had been diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic stomach cancer and had, at best, five years to live.

“I immediately thought, ‘Okay, my life is completely different now,'” she said.

For more on Baloy’s story, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

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Soon, Baloy found the strength to process and accept the heartbreaking reality that the future she imagined for herself – a life in a home filled with the noise of children and dogs – was not in the plan. “I changed my mind,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to get every bit of life I can out of this. I can’t do anything — I might as well have fun.’ ”

Courtesy of the Baloy family

That party included checking off the lofty bucket list item of meeting Gordon Ramsay, a life goal.

“He’s just the coolest man alive,” Baloy told PEOPLE after Ramsay flew her and her family to Miami for the opening of his new Lucky Cat restaurant in February. “He gave us the VIP A-list, celebrity experience.”

Gordon Ramsay mourns ‘inspirational’ cancer patient Maddy Baloy, who introduced him as one of her bucket list items

Baloy was in the midst of checking off another item on her bucket list — “Seeing everything I can” — by taking a dream trip to Japan with her fiancé when her health took a turn for the worse in March. On the penultimate day of the trip, “she started having really bad stomach and back cramps,” Risher says.

Well enough to fly from Tokyo to Tampa, Baloy went straight to the hospital when she got home, where her condition worsened. “She was fighting so hard and she just said, ‘I’m tired of being in pain, Mom,'” recalls Carissa Talmage, Baloy’s mother. “That’s when we knew we had to go to hospice.”

Courtesy of the Baloy family

Early on the morning of May 2, 2024, Maddy died, surrounded by her fiancé and family. While Risher says Baloy has completed “everything she really wanted to do on her bucket list,” one item remains: her dream fall wedding. Still, in her final days, “we made a mutual decision that we were married for life,” Risher says.

Reflecting on Baloya’s last year of life, Risher adds, “Over the past year — her journey with cancer — she has done so many amazing things and touched so many lives. It was an amazing journey.”

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Source: HIS Education