Rachel Rhee was visiting her parents in Orange County, California, on August 26, 2018, when she started feeling ill. “I was feeling super fatigued. I just had low energy. It was the summertime, so I thought it was because of the heat and being out in the sun,” Rachel said in an interview with The Patient Story.

Rachel felt too exhausted to make the drive back to her place in Los Angeles, so she crashed at her parents’ house. Around 7 a.m. the next day, she “…woke up abruptly with sharp pains in my lower right abdomen. A lot of extreme cramping, to the point where I couldn’t stand up straight,” she wrote in her blog, The Dimple Life.

She felt nauseous and threw up. The abdominal pain intensified, and then moved to her lower back. Too wracked with pain to shout for help, Rachel used her cell phone to call her mother, who was downstairs. She began sweating profusely and had an urgent need to pee and, “…when I got up to flush, I noticed the whole toilet was a dark red. Almost like the color of coca-cola with a red tint,” she wrote in The Dimple Life.

Rachel and her mom headed to an urgent care center, which sent her to a nearby hospital for a CT scan to check for what the medical experts suspected were kidney stones. “…They said they would do a CT scan just in case to rule out anything else but said I should be out of there in a couple of hours with some medication to let the stones pass,” Rachel told The Patient Story.

The diagnosis: From kidney stones to kidney cancer

But kidney stones weren’t the problem. “The doctor came in at the ER and told me that they examined my scan and saw a mass on my kidney. Then they started asking me about cancer,” Rachel told The Patient Story.

A urologist explained that the mass was about 3 inches (8 centimeters), and spanned almost the entire kidney. They were fairly certain it was kidney cancer, one of the 10 most common cancers that affects more than 76,000 Americans every year. The extreme fatigue, stabbing pains, and blood in the urine (hematuria) that Rachel experienced were all signs of kidney cancer. “Within 24 hours I went from thinking everything was fine to now — 12 hours later, I have cancer,” she recalled during The Patient Story interview. “Everything was just really hard to process.”

Given the large size of the tumor, doctors advised operating as soon as possible. But Rachel sought out a second, and then third, opinion. “Every situation is different, but it was really important for me to have a doctor that cared and wanted to make sure I was comfortable,” she told The Patient Story.

All of the experts agreed the mass was most likely cancer and needed to come out. Rachel went with the doctor who, she felt, really cared for his patients. “He was giving me the care and attention that I needed,” she explained to The Patient Story. 

A challenging recovery after robotic kidney surgery

About two weeks later, on September 11, surgeons performed a nephrectomy using robotic technology to remove the diseased kidney. “Because they use a robot, the incisions are smaller than they would be if it were a surgeon physically making each of the cuts,” Rachel told The Patient Story. “The robot they use for the surgery has five or six arms and one of them is for pumping air into your abdomen to make space for the doctors to work. They told me beforehand that I’d be passing a lot of gas and feel very airy inside because of the way the surgery is done.”

Tests on the tumor confirmed that Rachel had renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the most common type of kidney cancer. RCC develops inside the lining of small tubes called tubules that help the kidneys filter waste from the blood. It accounts for 9 out of 10 kidney cancer diagnoses.

The good news was that the cancer hadn’t spread outside of the tumor to nearby lymph nodes or organs. It was localized to the kidney. But because of the tumor’s large size, it was a stage 2 cancer. Still, Rachel’s prognosis was excellent. The American Cancer Society estimates that 93% of people with localized kidney cancer live for at least five years after the initial diagnosis. Most people live much longer. Metastatic kidney cancer that spreads to other organs is more difficult to treat and has a five-year survival rate of about 13%.

At the time of the diagnosis, Rachel had been busy launching a career as a health and wellness coach for stressed-out, overworked corporate professionals. She felt in the prime of her life. Thousands of people followed her daily workouts on her Instagram account (@justdimpleit), joined her online wellness community (You Are Here), and read her blog (The Dimple Life) for advice on wellness, careers, beauty, relationships, and more.

“I feel so grateful that it was stage 2 and luckily had not metastasized yet but what a shock it was!” she told VoyageLA during a February 2019 interview. “At a time when I felt my healthiest, I also suddenly felt the worst.”

Despite being in great physical shape before the surgery, it took Rachel “…a solid two months until I felt like I could walk on my own or stand up straight,” she told The Patient Story. “…Everything was so painful. It felt like I was never going to be able to walk normal again.”

Putting her wellness knowledge to work to help others

One week before the surgery, Rachel wrote on her blog, The Dimple Life, about the diagnosis and upcoming treatment. In the post, she pleaded with her future self to: “Stop worrying so much. Chill out. Breathe. You are way more tough than you ever realized. Do something with this struggle to help others reconnect with the strength that is inside each of us.”

Three years post-surgery, Rachel continues to be cancer-free. She’s made good on her promise to help others. She added blog content about cancer prevention measures and how to support a loved one who has a serious illness. She regularly hosts wellness events around Los Angeles, using the events “…as an opportunity to foster community and also create awareness for non-profit organizations,” she told VoyageLA. “I walked away from my experience with cancer with such a deeper level of understanding of how I want to live my life, who I want to live it with, and how I want to impact the world around me.”

Sources

• Key statistics about kidney cancer. American Cancer Society. January 2021.

• Survival rates for kidney cancer. American Cancer Society. January 2021.

• What is kidney cancer? American Cancer Society. May 2020.

• Rhee, R. How I discovered I have kidney cancer. The Dimple Life. September 3, 2018.

• Rachel’s kidney cancer story: Renal cell carcinoma, stage 2. The Patient Story.

• Conversations with the inspiring Rachel Rhee. VoyageLA. February 25, 2019.

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