Young Yekaterinburg Woman Dies Suddenly From Blood Cancer

Yekaterinburg resident Daria Guz died rapidly from cancer. Less than a month passed from the first symptoms to her death. Before that, the 26-year-old hair extension specialist felt completely healthy. The first signs were bruises on her legs.

“A week before she was hospitalized, she started getting bruises on her legs. We didn«t pay attention, thinking it was because of an escape room we went to a few days earlier. It turns out, the cancer had already started, but we didn»t know. Then she went to Kazakhstan for blepharoplasty, but didn«t have time to do it. At night, she called me and started screaming and crying into the phone that her limbs were going numb, she couldn»t get out of bed, her whole body was shaking violently, and she was scared.”

She called an ambulance, and I was in touch with her until it arrived, and she was taken to the hospital. She sent me the test results, from which I learned she had acute blood cancer (the most severe cancer with very low survival, plus her tests were very critical). In the hospital, she fought for her life for three weeks, but the disease prevailed,” said Daria«s friend Angelica.

Her friend Angelica received the last message on the morning of December 19, when Daria was urgently transferred to intensive care, her organs were failing, and she could barely breathe. The next day, Daria died from heart failure.

Daria didn«t have time to start a family, she had no parents, and is survived by a sister and a beloved dog, which her friend took in.

Hematologist Tatiana Konstantinova from Yekaterinburg explained that leukemia is a tumor disease of blood cells. In leukemia, white blood cells undergo pathological transformation and uncontrolled division. They replace normal bone marrow cells, from which circulating white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets are formed.

Symptoms of leukemia are nonspecific — weakness, dizziness, high temperature without obvious reasons, pain in the arms and legs, sometimes bleeding. If a person has no concerns, for prevention and early detection of leukemia, doctors recommend taking a blood test once a year.

According to the Sverdlovsk regional Ministry of Health, six out of ten cancer cases are detected at early stages. The increase in cancer cases is associated with improved quality of medical examinations, including check-ups using new methods and technologies. In 2024, 568,000 residents of Yekaterinburg underwent medical prevention.

Note that annually more than 29,000 Russians are diagnosed with blood system diseases. For many of them, hope for recovery lies in bone marrow transplantation. Each year, 1,500 patients need transplantation.

The only way to defeat the disease is to completely destroy the patient«s own hematopoietic system, suppress the immunity to prevent rejection (for this, high-dose chemotherapy is administered), and populate the bone marrow with donor cells. Components of donor blood must be genetically completely identical to the patient»s blood components, which is why so many donors are needed.

The Federal Registry was created on September 1, 2022, to facilitate the search for suitable bone marrow (hematopoietic stem cell) donors for patients with oncohematological diseases, severe blood diseases, or immune system disorders. Any Russian citizen aged 18 to 45 can become a donor.

Earlier we reported how little Karina from Yekaterinburg met with her bone marrow donor who helped her defeat blood cancer. And Chelyabinsk biker Maxim Golovin donated hematopoietic stem cells for a young woman from Yekaterinburg.

Also read the story of Kristina Khrebtova from Nizhny Tagil: her life was saved by her own brother who became a donor.