A TikTok star has died from a rare liver cancer at age 27 following a seven-year battle with the disease.
Rachel Yaffe, from Maryland, passed away on October 11, with one of her tragic final posts detailing how she was feeling weak after another bout of radiation.
In the clip, she appears in good spirits, but she reveals how her appetite was starting to wane, as evident from her increasingly frail figure.
Ms Yaffe – who documented her cancer journey online – said she felt like something was wrong in her late teens but put it down to a gluten intolerance.
But after visiting a doctor who saw her level of concern, she was referred to a specialist who discovered a 20cm tumor in her liver.
A biopsy confirmed fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, a rare form of cancer that is unique because it affects mostly young, healthy people.
The disease is extremely rare, only affecting around 200 people the world each year.
The majority of cases are in teenagers and young adults, though cases of patients as young as two and as old as 74 have been recorded.
Because there are few tell-tale symptoms, most patients are diagnosed late and the disease has already spread from the liver to other parts of the body where it becomes much harder to treat.
The five-year survival rate for stage I fibrolamellar carcinoma is 86%, however this plummets to 44% if the cancer progresses to stage 2 onwards.
After experiencing bloating in her abdomen, Ms Yaffe was diagnosed with stage 4 fibrolamellar and she was rushed in for surgery a few days later for the tumor to be removed.
While she believed that this would be the end of her cancer saga, it was just the beginning, and it returned three months later in the liver and the lungs.
This, she said, is when she ‘kicked into gear with research and healing.’
Over the years, the former college lacrosse player said she tried everything to battle the disease, including traditional and alternative medicines.
Many of Ms Yaffe’s past posts on Instagram capture shots of healthy meals, as she strived to nourish her body with dishes such as homemade chicken soup and ‘brown rice noodles with sautéed veggies.’
Touching on how her diet changed during her cancer journey, Ms Yaffe tells viewers in a TikTok posted this July: ‘I was plant-based vegan for quite a long amount time.
‘After going what I’ve been through and reevaluating my blood work with my new practitioners, we found out that I was pretty deficient in some of the nutrients that I really needed from proteins and fats so I’m actually leaning more into the keto carnivore diet, which is so new for me.’
She finishes the post by showing the contents of her lunch plate, which a piece of avocado, two chicken and apple sausages, a piece of turkey bacon and and an egg, ‘all cooked in beef tallow.’
After living in Los Angeles for a period of time, Ms Yaffe relocated to New York in September 2023, where her sister lives.
However, shortly after her big move she was hit by a major health setback in February of this year as her lung hemorrhaged.
In a TikTok post, Ms Yaffe explains that this was due to a tumor putting pressure on her heart and blocking the airflow to her lung, which caused it to bleed.
While she underwent multiple life-saving emergency procedures and was intubated for three days, her parents gave consent for her to start radiation and immunotherapy to shrink the tumor and stop the bleeding.
In an update Ms Yaffe gave on her condition in June, she said she got scans back and there were some ‘really positive parts and some not so ideal parts’ so she was figuring out her plan and next steps.
While the majority of the tumors in her body looked ‘stable,’ there was one in her abdomen that doctors were concerned about so she opted for proton therapy to treat it.
With proton beam therapy, beams of particles called protons treat the tumor.
But unlike X-rays, they don’t carry on travelling (through healthy tissue) after reaching their target; they instead come to a halt.
Ms Yaffe said she found that she experienced less side effects from the proton therapy and it didn’t impact her normal life.
After this most recent round of proton therapy, Ms Yaffe rested up at her parents’ home in Baltimore before returning to New York at the end of August.
However, in a TikTok posted from her apartment in Manhattan on September, she appears to be weaker than ever, with her physique increasingly frailer.
This would be her final video.
Maintaining an upbeat frame of mind, Ms Yaffe tells viewers: ‘I lost so much of my strength when I was getting radiation and I’m starting from day one.
‘It’s been so hard to get up and force myself to move, so I’m working on doing that.
‘Thankfully it’s easier to walk around here being in the city.
‘Plus, I’m working really hard to stick to a really strict food regimen for cancer healing so its taking up a lot of energy.
‘I [have] a pretty low appetite so its been a little bit difficult both physically and mentally but I’m working on just focusing on the small things that that bring me joy.
‘I’m really, really, really prioritizing my mental health as well.’
On October 11, Ms Yaffe’s obituary was posted online with details surrounding her funeral.
It reads: ‘She is survived by her devoted parents, Linda (nee Bass) and Wayne Yaffe; cherished brother and sister, Jordan Yaffe and Jessica Yaffe; dear grandmother, Sydney Bass; and loving dog, Layla.’
In a TikTok pinned at the top of her feed, Ms Yaffe says her lasting message is for others to get checked out by doctors if they think something is wrong.
She says, touching on how she dealt with symptoms long before getting help: ‘I feel like everybody was making me feel like it was my anxiety and like I was crazy and I know a lot of people have stories like this.
‘It made me stop trusting my body and the signals that it was sending me… because everyone was telling me that I was wrong and they couldn’t find anything.
‘If there is one thing that I’ve learned, it is to trust your body. Don’t let anybody make you feel like you are wrong or crazy for feeling certain things.’
