The Abridged version:
- West Sacramento Councilmember and Deputy District Attorney Quirina Orozco was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer in November 2022, just 2 days after making history on election day.
- Doctors predicted she had three years to live.
- After a promising clinical trial failed and her cancer continued to spread she faced an unimaginable decision: to plan for her death or her life.
- Her cancer is uncurable. She takes chemotherapy and upwards of 60 pills a day to boost her immune system. But she says: “My celebration of life is now.”
It was Nov. 10, 2022. Quirina Orozco had just finished an exhausting campaign for West Sacramento City Council that created the first all-female council in her city’s history. She went to a routine doctor’s appointment.
“At the end of the conversation, I said, ‘Might I ask you; I’m a fitness instructor part-time and every time I do abs, I notice that the right side of my abdominal side, it rises? Could that be a hernia?’” she recalled in a recent interview with Abridged.
Her doctor ordered an ultrasound. The scan revealed something far more serious.
“In the subsequent days thereafter, I learned that I had stage 4 kidney cancer,” she said. “It had metastasized around my body. To my lungs, my liver, my adrenal glands and other tissues in my abdomen.”
Then came the words that would redefine her life: “The life expectancy for someone with your condition is three years.”
That was three years ago today.
“I had to make the choice on how that was going to look,” Orozco said. “And so today, I’m privately celebrating every single day and thereafter.”
A life built on resilience
Resilience has always been Orozco’s way forward. She grew up in poverty, the daughter of a single mother who was just 16 when she gave birth to Orozco. They lived in low-income housing throughout Sacramento. Orozco recalls the feeling of staying in a dark dreary motel along West Capitol Avenue in the shadows of West Sacramento City Hall where she now serves as that district’s councilmember.
From that foundation, she built a life of achievement and public service. Orozco, 50, earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, worked for the White House Office of Management and Budget and became a Sacramento County child abuse prosecutor, dedicating her career to protecting the most vulnerable.
In 2016, she was elected to the West Sacramento City Council, becoming the longest-serving woman elected official in the city’s history. She has served four terms as Mayor Pro Tem.
A mother of four, Orozco has also led local initiatives for youth, education and families experiencing homelessness.
All of that purpose would become her compass when cancer entered her life.
Fight or flight
The treatment began immediately, and she is still on chemotherapy today. She takes upwards of 60 pills to help boost her immune system. From the start, the regimen was relentless, but Orozco stayed hopeful, joining a promising clinical trial that she believed might change everything.
A year later, the trial failed. “My sense and my belief in my ability to overcome transcended that,” she said. “But my cancer was more aggressive than the medicine I was receiving, and the cancer spread further.” She was forced to face a question most people never do.
“Is it time to plan for my death?” she said, “or is it time to plan for my life? And I did both, frankly.”
Together with her husband, Jose Yepes, she planned her estate and even her own celebration of life. But when that was done, something lifted.
“Once that was released,” she said, “it was time to start living.”
That day marked a turning point. “My celebration of life is now,” she said. “We all have our pains and suffering that we deal with every single day. It’s a question of whether you have resignation or look into possibility. For me, the story of my life was really left up to me.”
Choosing how to live
As her treatment continued, Orozco reframed her journey.
“There’s the mentality of ‘why me,’ and there’s the mentality of ‘why not me,’ who was I to argue for my limitations? How dare I not continue to dream of transcending limiting beliefs?’” she said. “For me, I wanted my kids to see that mommy was brave, that she went out there despite the circumstances, and that the circumstances didn’t define her.”
Doctors told her the cancer wasn’t curable, but she didn’t let that define her either.
“I actually think three years ago life started,” she said. “Started when I was told it would end.”
She began to see her life not through fear, but through clarity. “Life didn’t get easier for me,” she said. “I had to learn how to be stronger.”
Her days became a practice in gratitude. “I live every day by recalibrating,” she said, “and trying to remember that fear is the biggest disease. Not cancer.”
A life redefined
Orozco says she no longer measures time in years, but in moments.
She used to sit through Little League games and soccer games with a City Council packet or legal case on her lap. “The parents knew me as that mom,” she said. “I’d show up and I thought that was good enough.”
Her child would run up after a play and say, “Did you see that?” She admits: “I don’t know that I always did.”
Now she sees those moments through a different lens; by living fully in the present moment.
“I used to think being present meant showing up,” she said. “Now I know it means really being there, seeing the moment, feeling it, living it.”
Her transformation has been both physical and psychological.
“It takes discipline and a lot of mind-shift to be committed to such a transformation,” she said. “But you get this one wild and precious life. Cancer delivered that realization to me. This is all finite, it’s all temporary, and so what am I going to do with the rest of it?”
Her message to others
Through it all, Orozco remains deeply aware of her fortune to be telling her story on the day she wasn’t supposed to see.
“I feel overwhelmed with privilege, quite frankly, because I know this doesn’t look the same for everyone,” she said. “They had to carve through my abdomen, but I still have one kidney left. I’m able to live a full life with one kidney, regardless of the metastasis otherwise.”
She’s clear-eyed about her condition, not falsely optimistic but purposefully alive.
People ask her daily how she’s doing. They say she looks great. They ask her if they should celebrate remission. She says the answer is: “no, but we should celebrate my vibrancy and vitality. I moved the goal line from being cured to healing.”
“It’s not curable and it doesn’t look like remission is on the horizon, which could land on my shoulders pretty heavily if I allowed it,” she said.
“There wasn’t a really good likelihood that I’d be sitting here with you today,” she said.
Despite the diagnosis, she is living more purposefully now than ever, with “the immense belief in my ability to heal. There’s vitality that’s manifested by just appreciation for where we’ve been.”
Orozco says, “three years ago life started.”
Rob Stewart is an executive producer and reporter for Abridged PBS KVIE.