The Power of Community
- TikTok user Trent Heinrichs (@southofthe49th) has become a source of knowledge and inspiration to his 124.4k followers.
- Heinrichs responded to a call to share a one in a million story on TikTok and he became a viral sensation by sharing the story of his wife’s brain cancer diagnosis.
- The story of Heinrichs’s online popularity speaks to the unconditionally inclusive nature of the wider cancer community.
Within the past year, 46-year-old TikTok user Trent Heinrichs has become a source of knowledge and inspiration to his 124.4k followers. Under the handle @southofthe49th, Heinrichs has posted countless moving tributes to his late wife, Sunny, while also attempting to help viewers through their own personal losses. His online success, however, was never part of the plan.
Read More After losing Sunny to a lengthy brain cancer battle on New Year’s Eve 2019, Heinrichs was left with the monumental task of guiding their two children through their grief. In 2020 he created a TikTok account to give them "something to smile about." He would mostly post clips of him and the kids having fun. The account rarely featured content referring to Sunny's passing directly. That all changed when he responded to another TikTok user's request for "1 in a million" stories In a post that now has around 8.7 million views, Heinrichs provided the shocking story behind his wife's initial diagnosis. In the video, he recalls sustaining a head injury while on a work trip in 2012. He was rushed to a local ER and received medical attention for a wound on the right side of his forehead. After being ordered to return home early by his employer, he arrived to find his wife, who had recently reported experiencing a headache, in a serious amount of pain. This resulted in Sunny being rushed to the hospital where a large tumor (grade 2 oligodendroglioma) was removed from a spot of her brain that lined up almost perfectly with Trent's wound. If he had returned home only slightly later than he did, she would have been in a coma. Sunny recovered via chemotherapy and lived happily until an aggressive recurrence many years later. The post quickly exploded in popularity, leaving Heinrichs stunned. He received an outpouring of comments offering both prayers and stories from users about their own losses. In a follow-up thank you post, Heinrichs recalled his daughter stealing his phone because reading the comments brought her so much joy. The love received helped him to be more open about his grief.
Today, Heinrichs has decided to pay it forward and inspire his followers with posts that pay tribute to Sunny's memory. His loving descriptions praise her loving nature and devotion to God. He also answers questions from those going through similar experiences. The story of Trent Heinrichs’s online popularity speaks to the unconditionally inclusive nature of the wider cancer community.
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