An influencer has told how doctors gave her just 24 hours to live after an X-ray revealed an aggressive cancer was “crushing” her insides.
Rafaela Ribeiro shed nearly three stone in just weeks earlier this year, but thought she was simply losing weight.
“I thought everything was fine, that I was just losing weight very quickly,” the mum-of-two, who has almost 600,000 Instagram followers, told Need To Know.
“I never imagined it would be anything more serious.”
But Rafaela, 24 – a real estate agent from São Paulo, Brazil – was soon diagnosed with B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare and aggressive cancer of the lymphatic system.
She said: “It started with a constant dry cough and then came the swelling in my neck and armpits.
“A few days later, I could no longer swallow anything solid because the tumour was squeezing my chest.”
At first, medics dismissed her symptoms as pneumonia or an allergic cough.
But after she collapsed and could no longer eat, scans revealed the shocking truth.
She said: “The tumours were crushing me from the inside.
“My oesophagus was compressed and my heart felt like it was being taken over, but it was just the pressure from the tumours.”
Rafaela began chemotherapy, but during treatment contracted a deadly hospital superbug.
She was placed in an induced coma for nine days as doctors warned her husband, Michell, that she might not survive the night.
She said: “They told my husband I could die within 24 hours.
“Miraculously, I survived.”
The coma, she believes, actually saved her life.
She said: “This period of fasting helped me achieve remission.
“If I hadn’t caught this infection and ended up in a coma, they might not have been able to control the disease.”
Now in remission, Rafaela is awaiting cutting-edge CAR-T cell therapy – an immunotherapy that trains the body’s own cells to destroy cancer.
She said: “Today, the disease is stable; it’s still present, but it’s under control.
“I’m on the waiting list for cell therapy.”
Throughout her ordeal, Michell has been Rafaela’s rock.
She said: “He was the one who held it all together.
“I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without him.”
The couple share two sons, aged eight and two.
