Madelynn May spent much of her teenage years carrying an oxygen tank and facing a future in which doctors feared she could eventually need a lung transplant. Today, the 23-year-old content creator has built an online audience of more than 750,000 Instagram followers and a career she never expected to have. The journey between those two realities was anything but straightforward.
A severe fungal infection led to pulmonary failure, life support, and years of treatment. Her health problems also disrupted her education, with May saying ninth grade was the last full grade she completed before later obtaining her GED. Years later, regular pulmonary function tests show a very different picture.
“I got very, very lucky,” May told The Blast. “They say my lungs are better than most people my age now.”
Madelynn May Spent Her Teenage Years Fighting To Recover
May grew up moving frequently around the American South because her father was a Marine. Her teenage years changed dramatically after she developed serious respiratory problems, including recurring pneumonia, ear infections, and sinus infections.
Her condition eventually deteriorated to the point that she suffered pulmonary failure and was placed on life support. “My parents got a call just, ‘Hey, your kid is on life support in our hospital,’” she recalled.
Doctors discovered an Aspergillus fungal infection affecting her respiratory system. May says mould was found in her lungs, ears and sinuses, and she underwent numerous procedures as doctors tried to treat it. For around three years, she relied on supplemental oxygen. “I had to walk around with an oxygen tank,” she said. “My oxygen would drop really low.”
At one stage, May says doctors discussed the possibility that she could eventually need a lung transplant. Instead, her lungs recovered. The experience came at a cost to the ordinary teenage life she might otherwise have had.
Her education was interrupted by her health, and she says she did not complete high school traditionally. May later earned her GED, but much of that period was focused on something more immediate: getting well.
It was during her recovery that social media began to take on a bigger role in May’s life. There was no grand plan to turn herself into a professional creator. Initially, being online simply gave her something enjoyable to focus on after spending so much time dealing with hospitals and treatment. “At first, I used social media as a way to distract myself during recovery,” she said. “It was just something fun.”
May also saw an opportunity to speak about what she had experienced. “I wanted to raise awareness of what I had been through,” she said. “I never imagined it would turn into a career.”
That career did not appear instantly. May began creating short-form content and posting consistently on TikTok, experimenting with different ideas and responding to comments from viewers. Then one remarkably simple video changed her trajectory.
The clip lasted around seven seconds, but it caught the attention of TikTok’s audience and rapidly spread across the platform. “It got like 20 million views,” May said.
A Viral TikTok Changed The Direction Of Her Life
The success of the video introduced May to an audience far beyond the one she had previously reached. It also demonstrated how unpredictable building a career online could be. There had been no elaborate production behind her breakthrough and no certainty that the video would perform differently from anything else she had posted.
May had simply continued creating until something connected. That willingness to experiment fits a personality she describes as naturally outspoken. “I’m kind of just a verbal spitfire,” she said. “I say a lot too much.”
Rather than presenting a carefully polished version of herself at all times, May’s personality became part of what people responded to.
Her social media presence continued to grow, eventually developing from the distraction she had found during recovery into her full-time career. It was an outcome she could hardly have planned during the years when her day-to-day concerns revolved around oxygen levels rather than follower counts.
Madelynn May Is Focused On The Life She Has Now
May’s story is not a conventional rise through the influencer world. She did not begin with a carefully mapped career strategy, and her teenage years had already forced her to adapt to circumstances outside her control.
What began as a way to occupy herself during recovery ultimately gave her a new direction. Today, May has more than 750,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts as @bubblebabyz0, and has turned content creation into a successful career.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. Her health has improved dramatically from the years when she needed supplemental oxygen and faced uncertainty over the future of her lungs. She continues to undergo regular pulmonary function tests and says the results have remained positive.
For May, that recovery puts everything that followed into perspective. Social media may have given her an unexpected career, but having the health to pursue it is the part of her story she once had far less reason to take for granted. “I got very, very lucky,” she said.
