Viewers watched Kelley Mack‘s character Addy fight off zombies on The Walking Dead. But little did the actress know, she’d be in a whole new kind of fight just a few years later.
Kelley—also known as Kelley Klebenow—died Aug. 2 after a battle with a cancerous tumor known as glioma of the central nervous system, her family recently announced. She was 33 years old.
The voiceover artist announced in January that she was diagnosed with diffuse midline glioma, which she explained was “an extremely rare” type of astrocytoma cancer.
However, Kelley had started experiencing symptoms months before her diagnosis.
“In September, I moved into a new apartment with my boyfriend, Logan,” she recalled in a Jan. 3 Instagram post. “For a month after that, I had persistent lower back pain and thought I slipped a disc. A few weeks later, I had neuropathic itching in my right quad. And then, the shooting pains in my legs and back began, which resulted in me having to sleep in a recliner for a month because laying down was too painful.”
Then, “on Thanksgiving Eve,” Kelley continued, “I had emergency MRIs done at the hospital, which revealed an abnormal mass in my spinal cord.”
