Kaley Williamson's father pushes cervical cancer screening after daughter's death
The 23-year-old from Orléans died in June after battling the disease; her father is urging everyone to listen to their bodies and demand thorough care.
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Kevin Williamson remembers the exact moment his world changed. On March 17, 2025, months of unanswered questions about his daughter's constant fatigue, pain, and unusual discharge finally made sense: a 7.2-centimetre mass on her cervix.
Kaley Williamson, a 21-year-old from Orléans who spent her days training at a cheerleading gym and dreaming of becoming a personal support worker, faced 15 months of chemotherapy and hospital stays. She died on June 7, 2026, at age 23.
Now her father is determined to ensure her legacy saves others. "Know your body," he told the Ottawa Citizen. "If the doctor says that it's fine, don't worry about it, say, 'Well, no. Let's take a minute and think about this for a second here,' and use Kaley as an example."
Kaley's case is particularly striking because she'd received the HPV vaccine in high school, which protects against the virus strains linked to most cervical cancers. After noticing something wasn't right, she asked her doctor for a Pap smear in November 2024, which came back negative. Two weeks after being treated for what doctors thought was a yeast infection, she returned complaining the symptoms hadn't improved. That's when the ER found the mass.
Gynecologists told the family a mass that size would typically take two-and-a-half years to develop. Kaley's appeared in months. Cervical cancer is among the fastest rising cancers in Canada, with an estimated 1,700 diagnoses expected in 2026 and about 450 deaths, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
But the good news: it's "almost entirely preventable" through vaccination and regular screening, according to Dr. Anna Wilkinson, a family physician and general practitioner oncologist at The Ottawa Hospital. As of March 2025, Ontario health centres started using a more sensitive primary HPV test that looks for cancer-causing strains with about 96 per cent sensitivity — superior to traditional Pap smears, which can miss abnormalities up to half the time.
Wilkinson describes it simply: "we used to look for the smoke from the fire, and now we're looking for the actual flames itself."
