Mother, 24, shrugged off her dry cough… unaware it was deadly cancer crushing her internal organs

A young mother-of-two was distraught to learn that her body was riddled with a rare cancer which was crushing her internal organs—and credits picking up a hospital superbug for her subsequent survival. 

Rafaela Ribeiro, 24, shed nearly three stone in just weeks earlier this year, but thought she was simply losing weight. 

She said: ‘I thought everything was fine, that I was just losing weight very quickly. 

‘I never imagined it would be anything more serious.’

But Ms Ribeiro, who works as an estate agent and influencer in São Paulo, Brazil, was later 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.’

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer which usually starts in the lymph nodes. 

Stats shared by cancer charity Macmillan cite that nine out of 10 people diagnosed with have a B-cell lymphoma, which forms in white blood cells. 

At first, medics dismissed Ms Ribeiro’s symptoms as pneumonia or an allergic cough, but after she collapsed and could no longer eat, scans revealed that her upper body was packed full of tumours.

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.’

Ms Ribiero 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.

CAR T-cell therapy (chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy) is a form of immunotherapy, using the power of a patient’s immune system to fight the disease.

There are several types that work in different ways to help the immune system recognise and attack cancer cells.

With CAR T-cell therapy, immune cells called T-cells are engineered to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

The process of making these weaponised T-cells is lengthy, complex and expensive.

It begins with hooking the patient up to a machine (similar to a dialysis machine used for kidney patients) that takes a sample of their blood and separates out their T-cells, before returning the rest of the blood to their body.

The machine repeats the process until it has collected 200ml of T-cells, which can take six hours.

In a lab, these T-cells are then engineered to hunt down and destroy the patient’s cancer. This is done using an inactivated virus to insert genetic material instructing the cells to make a protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that recognises a specific protein on the patient’s cancer cells.

The supercharged T-cells are then multiplied in the lab, before an infusion of 200 million cells is delivered to the patient via a drip, which takes just two minutes.

The cells should then home in on, and kill, cancer cells that have the protein they’ve been engineered to recognise.

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.’

Ms Ribiero credits her husband—with whom she shares two sons aged eight and two—for helping her throughout her cancer battle. 

She said: ‘He was the one who held it all together.

‘I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without him.’