How a Sacramento area councilwoman is dealing with a dire kidney cancer diagnosis | Opinion
Wearing a red dress with a cape, white faux-fur cuffs and a matching collar, West Sacramento City Councilwoman Quirina Orozco was recently rolled into a City Hall event space in a wheelchair to the delight of hundreds gathered there.
The 48-year-old prosecutor and mother of four had undergone surgery less than two weeks beforehand to remove a kidney and cancer growing on her liver, lymph nodes, adrenal glands and abdominal wall. She had been diagnosed with stage 4 renal cell carcinoma, discovered only weeks before at a regular checkup.
But this was the eighth annual West Sac Kids Give Back care package assembly event, which Orozco had been instrumental in planning since its inception. She wasn’t going to miss it for anything, including recovering from major surgery.
West Sac Kids Give Back gathers clothing and other personal care items every year for more than 1,000 West Sacramentans experiencing homelessness. Orozco founded the effort as an opportunity for children to participate in community service.
Orozco’s friend Bernadette Austin said the hall was packed for the event on Dec. 11, when Orozco was wheeled in by her husband of 10 years, Sacramento police Detective Jose Yepes. Orozco had gone public about the cancer only recently, so “for most folks, this was the first time they had seen her since they heard about the diagnosis,” Austin said. Parents and kids in attendance flocked to the councilwoman.
“Throughout the evening, she was handing out candy to the kids,” said Austin, the executive director of UC Davis’ Center for Regional Change. “No child left empty-handed.”
Afterward, Orozco went home and slept for more than a day.
‘Like a champ’
Heading into the holidays with a typically busy schedule, Orozco visited her doctor in November for a long-overdue checkup. When the doctor asked whether anything was wrong, the longtime fitness instructor mentioned that she had a small, hard lump in her abdomen. She thought it was a hernia and almost didn’t mention it.
“Just for the sake of being safe,” Orozco said the doctor told her, “Let’s send you to ultrasound.”
Then “the ultrasound tech was very serious about what she was doing,” Orozco added. “And then the next thing I know, I’m being sent to all these other tests.”
Orozco’s stage 4 diagnosis indicates that her cancer is advanced and has spread to other parts of her body, including her adrenal glands, liver, lungs and lymph nodes. It’s a terminal diagnosis, so her fight isn’t to beat the disease so much as to make the most of the time she has left.
“It’s just the worst news you could ever hear,” Orozco said. “The world stops cold. Nothing’s important other than what’s happening in the here and now, right at that moment.”
If detected early, kidney cancer is treatable with surgery, immunotherapy and radiation. A person diagnosed in the initial stages of the disease has a 93% chance of living five years. At stage 4, Orozco’s prognosis is significantly less.
After her surgery in late November, the working mother and politician who was always on the go needed a wheelchair and bed rest. She expects to start immunotherapy soon.
But Orozco is handling the challenge, like every challenge of her life so far, “like a champ,” she said laughing when I called her at her home in West Sacramento one recent morning.
“You get the news, it sinks in,” she said. “You try to embrace it and then roll up your sleeves and say, ‘OK, what do we do about this?’ ”
Orozco wants to focus on her family and community in the time she has left.
“If you’re going to give me three years, I am going to do wonders with that,” she said. “I can raise my children and see them off and know that my husband is set up and do all the things that we had planned to do when we were 62.”
Q’s superpowers
Orozco has served on the West Sacramento City Council for six years, currently as mayor pro tem, while raising a growing family and prosecuting child abuse cases for the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office.
Her impressive résumé — she has degrees from UC Berkeley and Harvard and experience working for the Lieutenant Governor’s Office and the White House — could have made her a contender for state office. But Orozco, who grew up in Sacramento, chose to serve her community on the West Sacramento council, which as of December consists entirely of women of color.
The daughter of a Mexican American father and Filipina American mother, Orozco has been honored with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Latina Estrella Champion Award and, this year, as an Asian American Pacific Islander Change Maker by The Bee. She is a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum Mountain Valley Chapter, an active member of the Mighty Rotary Club of West Sacramento and a graduate of the Hispanas Organized for Political Equality (HOPE) Leadership Institute. In addition to the City Council, she serves on the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District board and the Yolo County Executive Commission to Address Homelessness.
“She really cares about fostering the next generation of politics,” her friend Austin said. “She is there to guide and inspire and mentor folks who will lead like she does — from a place of equanimity and putting community needs before politics.”
Recently elected West Sacramento City Councilwoman Verna Sulpizio Hull said one of the first calls she made when she decided to run for office was to Orozco.
“Before that call, I had just found out I was pregnant, and nobody knew,” Sulpizio Hull said. “I was still a little nervous to share that news about being pregnant and running for City Council. (It’s a) very pivotal time, and I was worried that (it) would detract from what I brought to the table as a community leader.
“But I called her and I shared with her my desire to run for council and also the news that I was pregnant — and she gave me the confidence that I could run for council while pregnant. And she was excited to think that I could be the first woman to be sworn in pregnant, and … she saw that it was an opportunity for me to step into a new leadership role and show other women that they could do it, too.”
Before a nervous Sulpizio Hull participated in her first debate, Orozco — sometimes known simply as “Q,” her first initial — handed her an envelope containing “the most incredible card” and a gold Tower Bridge necklace.
“(It) was gifted to her by a friend early in her campaign, and she gave it to me to wear and I felt — I felt like she was giving me just a little bit of her superpowers,” Sulpizio Hull recalled. “I wore that necklace the entire campaign, and I get compliments on it daily. And I truly feel like it’s a little bit of Q’s superpowers that I get to take with me everywhere I go.”
Get a checkup
There is no happy ending to report here. Orozco faces a rapidly ticking clock and ruthless odds. Her friends hope her cancer is another seemingly impossible challenge Q can overcome.
“She’s one of the strongest and (most) tenacious women I know,” Sulpizio Hull said. “I’m absolutely holding on to her fighting this battle and winning. West Sacramento is such a better place with her.”
Orozco said she plans to continue working as a councilwoman, and with her fellow female council members, until she no longer can. But she also wants to spend more time with her husband and children.
“She’s doubled down on giving even more to her family and even more to her community,” Austin said, “because she realizes that, you know, time is precious. We’re, none of us, guaranteed more time on this Earth.”
The best-laid plans go awry, whether of mice, men or a seemingly superhuman mother, councilwoman, prosecutor and fitness instructor who has more to give than fate might allow. But in the wake of her diagnosis, Orozco is still looking for a plan.
“If this plan is for me to add a little bit more to my story, to find some other way to inspire the world to do something,” she said, “let it be to inspire other people to go out there and really, finally prioritize getting a 40-minute checkup.”
Orozco said several women have already told her that her diagnosis prompted them to schedule appointments with their doctors. That could be her latest gift to her community.
“There are so many people who are like her and me,” Austin said, “who are just ‘go, go, go,’ nonstop doing things for others, doing things for our community, doing things for our family. And so often … as women, as mothers, as the adult children who support our aging parents, as women of color, we are expected to shoulder the burden.
“It often means that we’ve put ourselves second, and I really think that this was a real wake-up call to people like her and me, and the people who really love her, that in putting others first, we can’t ignore our own health and our own well-being.”
