Mob Wives star Big Ang passed away early Thursday morning after battling stage four brain and lung cancer. She was 55 years old.
Ang (real name: Angela Raiola) was “surrounded with her loving husband and her family, who loved and supported her through her illness and her life,” according to Stephen Spinelli, her attorney and friend. Raiola revealed during an interview with Dr. Oz which aired Tuesday that she split up with husband Neil Murphy because “he didn’t step up to the plate” after her cancer diagnosis, but he was by her side at the hospital for the last moments of her life.
The reality star admitted during her Dr. Oz interview that doctors told her she only had a 30% chance of surviving, but said that she was determined to fight on with treatment. Her doctors were planning on moving forward with immunotherapy.
“My wife is a beast, she is just a beast,” said Murphy last November to SILive.com. “She’s like wine, she gets better with age. I mean, the lady had almost 25 hours of surgery in the past year. But after a couple weeks she was up and running.”
Raiola’s cancer was caused by a 40-year cigarette habit that saw her smoke up to a pack per day. She gave up the habit last March after an initial diagnosis of stage two throat cancer, then underwent surgery the following month to remove a tumor and all the lymph nodes on the left side of her neck. A similar procedure for the right side of her neck followed in June. Raiola announced last October that she was cancer-free, but was informed in December that the throat cancer had returned and spread to her brain and lungs.
The primary storyline on this season of Mob Wives was Raiola dealing with her cancer returning. Show producer and long-time friend Jenn Graziano said that Raiola “wanted to do whatever she could to shed light on it and get people to understand it better. There’s nothing fake about it. Those are real emotions.”
Her sister, Janine, started a GoFundMe page last month to help Raiola get cannabis oil in order to ease her pain. She admitted that “Angela cannot function to work anymore” after failing to respond to chemotherapy treatments at the beginning of the year. The GoFundMe page was launched on Feb. 2 and had a $25,000 goal, but has since raised nearly $45,000.