She amputated her arm due to a rare cancer. Her open-casket funeral for it went viral.

In late October, Eldiara Doucette found out she only had five days left with her arm.

The 22-year-old's synovial sarcoma − a rare cancer that affects soft tissue − had returned. Her hospital's tumor board met to discuss her options. Soon after, Doucette received a phone call with their recommendation: She needed to have her right arm amputated from above the elbow. Doing so would remove her dominant hand, but also the large, aggressive tumor at the center of her disease.

It's a horrible situation to be in, but, in Doucette's view, at least the path forward was clear. Now, all she wanted was to get it over with as soon as possible.

"I really did not want to wait around," she says. "So I ended up getting scheduled for a surgery that was like five days from that phone call."

First diagnosed with cancer at 19, Doucette had been documenting her life with the disease on social media. She posted sporadically and didn't have a large following, but a series she did counting down the days until her amputation went viral.

Now, another video of Doucette's is also going viral. After her amputation, she wanted to pay further respects to her arm. So she sent the limb to a mortician who embalmed it and held an open-casket funeral for it with her friends and family.

Her video of the event, which featured Doucette, her loved ones and her severed arm, has gotten over 15 million views on Instagram and nearly 40 million on TikTok. Doucette says the experience taught her a lot about cancer, healing and closure.

"In the video, you can kind of see me cycle through a few different emotions, and there was definitely a pretty big shock factor to it," she says. "I got to sit there and really process everything that I had lost within this arm and everything I wasn't ever going to get back, which is a very sad but necessary part of the healing process."

She lost her arm to cancer. Her open-casket funeral for it went viral.

Doucette first noticed something wasn't right with her arm when she was 16. She had pain and numbness in her hand, but thought it was due to carpel tunnel syndrome. At around 18, she saw a lump, but thought it was due to swelling.

At 19, an MRI revealed the truth: That lump was actually a golf-ball sized tumor on her median nerve. Further testing found it was cancerous.

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Doucette underwent a month of radiation and multiple surgeries, which put her cancer into remission. That lasted for about a year. Then her doctors found a new, cancerous mass.

"By that point, I knew that an amputation was going to be the next step most likely, because I had discussed it with my surgeon for quite some time," Doucette says. "There was no space to really remove it again without compromising the use of my arm severely."

In the days leading up to her amputation, Doucette sought to memorialize her arm as best she could. She did ink thumbprints. She made a plaster cast of her hand. She let her social media followers submit short messages to get written on her arm in marker. Some were funny, others heartfelt. "I appreciate your sacrifice," read one. "Thanks for all the wiping," read another. A friend photographed her with these messages on her arm at her favorite mountain in Southern California.

Then it was time for the procedure. During the operation, one of her videos about the amputation went viral.

"I remember waking up from my amputation to my friends and my boyfriend telling me that I had gained over a hundred thousand followers while I was in surgery," she says.

Doucette had made plans with a mortician to preserve the bones of her arm, and it was his idea to have the open-casket funeral.

"I asked him kind of jokingly if there was any way that I would be able to see my arm before it was sent off," she says. "In my head, I was kind of thinking a quick glance, but he was like, 'It's unconventional... but would you like to do it more of a viewing, where I could have some friends and some family come and we would get an hour in the room with it, and it would be prepared and dressed up, just like a full body would be?' "

Doucette says the answer was obvious: "Of course I took that opportunity. ... Part of my coping skills include finding silver linings in everything, even if it's weirdly morbid."

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Her friends were also on board. Doucette's one request was that they wear something black, which they happily obliged. Doucette wore a long black dress with a black veil.

She held the memorial in early January. She says the mortician kindly walked her through how it would go and how her arm would look.

Doucette appreciated the care he put into preserving her arm; he even made sure her fingernails were still painted black, the color she had going into surgery.

Her boyfriend's mother brought a corsage for the severed arm's wrist. Doucette found all the love and appreciation for the arm "weirdly touching."

When she walked into the room, it was her first time seeing her arm since the surgery. She cried for about a minute. She says it's what she needed.

"The last time I had seen it was when I was lifted onto the surgery table," she says. "I just remember holding it above my face and wiggling my fingers and trying to somehow process what was about to happen, and then I was out. So having a second opportunity almost to part ways in a less traumatic way was very surprisingly healing. Even though the whole thing started as a joke, it ended up being something that was very beautiful."

The funeral for her amputated arm changed the way she saw cancer

The whole experience also changed how Doucette saw her arm and, by extension, cancer and herself.

For years, Doucette says, she viewed her right arm as nothing more than a burden, the source of her suffering.

Seeing it lying before her, however, Doucette says her perspective started to shift. She started to see her arm not as an enemy, but as much a victim of her disease as the rest of her body.

"I started to almost forgive it more and almost see it as a martyr of this invader in my body," Doucette says. "At the end of the day, it is my body that is trying to fight this cancer, and it's the cancer that's fighting back. ... Having (my arm) taken away has almost helped me find forgiveness for it."

Since her amputation and viral memorial, Doucette's cancer treatment has continued. She's currently undergoing an aggressive form of chemotherapy, which she's also documenting online. She starts her third round later this month.

She's become more used to using her left hand for everything. She's had to grieve and accept there are some things she can't do anymore, like play guitar, but she's trying to stay positive. She says that, ultimately, her amputation was freeing.

"I almost felt angry at having this part of me that's connected but it was causing me so much grief and it wasn't even really functional," she says of life before her amputation. "So having the amputation opened up almost a life of opportunity for me."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: She had an open-casket funeral for her amputated arm. It went viral.