Kevin Williamson is still grappling with the loss of his 23-year-old daughter Kaley, who passed away from cervical cancer at the beginning of June. He's now trying to continue his daughter's legacy and raise awareness of the importance of young girls getting screened and knowing their bodies. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

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Kevin Williamson remembers the exact moment his world came crashing down.

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On March 17, 2025, months of unanswered questions about his daughter’s constant fatigue, unexplained pain and unusual discharge finally started making sense.

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The cause was a 7.2-centimetre mass on Kaley Williamson’s cervix that doctors warned would be difficult to treat.

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The diagnosis was bewildering for the 21-year-old from Orléans, who spent most of her days training and competing at the cheerleading gym with her two stepsisters, while working toward her dream of becoming a personal support worker or helping children.

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But instead of planning for the future, she spent the next 15 months up against the fight of her life, undergoing chemotherapy and other treatments, often spending weeks on end in the hospital. She died on June 7, 2026, at the age of 23.

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Now, her father is determined to ensure her legacy lives on by spreading Kaley’s message to everyone who will listen.

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“Know your body.”

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“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,” Williamson told the Ottawa Citizen.

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For Kaley, the cervical cancer diagnosis was even more shocking considering she’d received the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in high school, which protects against the virus strains linked to the vast majority of cervical cancers.

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After noticing something wasn’t right, Kaley asked her doctor for a Pap smear in November 2024, but the test came back negative. She returned to her doctor in March after noticing unusual discharge and odours, but was prescribed antibiotics for what was believed to be a yeast infection.

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“And she came home two weeks later, and she said, ‘It’s not better,’” Wiliamson recalled. “And that’s when they found the mass in the ER.”

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Gynecologists told the family a mass of that size would usually take two-and-a-half years to develop, while Kaley’s appeared to have grown within a matter of months.

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“Especially in Kaley’s case, she had a negative Pap smear, so when she went back, why would they even think cancer? It wouldn’t be a thought, but it has to be a thought,” Williamson said.

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Cervical cancer is among the fastest rising cancers in Canada. An estimated 1,700 women in Canada will be diagnosed in 2026, with an estimated 450 deaths from the disease, according to a report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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But the good news is that, through vaccination and regular screening, this cancer is “almost entirely preventable,” according to Dr. Anna Wilkinson, a family physician and general practitioner oncologist at The Ottawa Hospital.

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Doctors are also getting more effective tools to detect cervical cancer in its early stages.

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As of March 2025, around four months after Kaley asked for her Pap smear, health-care centres across Ontario started administering a primary HPV test to screen for cervical cancer, with screening taking place every five years instead of three.