
Heather McKelvey is looking forward to life as a doctor.
Newly graduated from medical school, the 33-year-old McKelvey is beginning her residency in emergency medicine at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton, California, with a little help from the Navy, which picked up her tuition tab in exchange for four years of service by Lieutenant McKelvey as a military physician down the road.
She’s wanted to be a doctor since college, pivoting from a career path as a physical therapist when she realized diagnostics appealed to her the most.
She’s excited. Life as a doctor will be nice.
Life as a patient, not so much.
Getting through med school is tough enough under normal circumstances. For McKelvey it was almost impossible, and nearly over before it started. That’s because she had to simultaneously negotiate her formidable course load and her treatment for aggressive sarcoma that simply would not go away.
Growing up bi-coastal — Mom lives in Huntington Beach, California, Dad’s in Philadelphia — McKelvey had an active, athletic, healthy childhood, playing soccer, basketball and field hockey and working as a junior lifeguard.
When she turned 26, McKelvey was in the best shape of her life. “I felt super healthy,” she recalled. “I was training for a marathon, working out every day, being careful about what I ate.” But she was “aging out” of her parents’ health insurance and needed to get her own. She went for a physical examination as part of the process.
That’s when she found out.
“The doctor felt a hard mass in my abdomen,” she said. “I’d never felt a thing. But now [with the doctor’s help], I did feel it.”
A Retroperitoneal Liposarcoma Diagnosis
The hard mass turned out to be retroperitoneal liposarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer that grows in fatty areas of the body. It needs to be removed surgically, but it often returns again and again.
McKelvey’s tumor was big — more than a foot long and probably weighing five to six pounds. And it was doing damage, crushing her right kidney and squeezing her inferior vena cava — the large vein that returns blood from the lower body back to the heart.
The news got worse. Doctors believed McKelvey’s sarcoma was “dedifferentiated,” the most dangerous form of the disease, known to grow rapidly and spread to other organs. “They told me I had one to two years to live,” she recalled.

Hearing this was “the most shocking thing ever in my life,” and it radically changed McKelvey’s plans. All set to enter medical school, she now told her parents that if the “de-diff” diagnosis was confirmed, she’d give up that dream and spend the remainder of her life traveling. Because what was the point?
Within days of her diagnosis, McKelvey was on the operating table. She gets emotional about it, not for herself, but for her family and friends who all came out to support her.
“I was so grateful and appreciative of them,” she said. “I mean, I just went to sleep. They had to sit there, those 10 hours. It was very hard on them.”
The surgical team removed the tumor without further damage to McKelvey’s major vein or kidney. Later, she remembered the unusual feeling of an abdomen without that extra five pounds. “It took a while to get used to that,” she said. “It felt so different. There was so much space there now.”
Pathology reports brought welcome news. The sarcoma wasn’t dedifferentiated after all, but “well-differentiated,” meaning it was less lethal and unlikely to spread elsewhere. “Go live your life,” the doctors told her.
Easier said.
Sarcoma patients typically get scans every three to six months following surgery. McKelvey’s second scan showed the cancer growing again. This was to become an unfortunate pattern over the next several years.
Controlling Sarcoma Regrowth
“It’s the nature of this disease,” explained William Tseng, M.D., associate clinical professor in the Division of Surgical Oncology. “Retroperitoneal liposarcoma tends to come back.”
On seeing the cancer reasserting itself, McKelvey’s original surgeons took a wait-and-see attitude. But she wanted a second opinion, so this inquisitive, aspiring medical student dove into the research and found Tseng, an acknowledged leader in retroperitoneal liposarcoma treatment.
It was the beginning of a relationship that has spanned two institutions and three more surgeries over the last seven years, and continues to this day.
Tseng had not yet arrived at City of Hope® (he came aboard in 2022) when he first met with McKelvey at his previous hospital and was immediately impressed.
“She’s unique,” said Tseng. “She knows a lot about her disease. She’s on another level. Our conversations are almost like speaking with another sarcoma expert.
“I like her as a medical student, and as a patient,” he continued. “She’s attended my academic lectures. She emails me questions about liposarcoma articles she’s read. And she makes decisions together with me about what’s next for her.”
He became her surgeon, and her cheerleader. When she wondered if her illness might make it impossible to continue medical school, Tseng encouraged her. “He said, ‘You’re going to become a doctor and work with me to save other people with sarcoma,’” she recalled. When the reluctant medical school administrators suggested McKelvey take a year off, Tseng wrote to them and set them straight.
“They thought she was terminal,” recalled Tseng. “They didn’t have a realistic perception of the disease. They had a skewed picture.
“She’s a testament to how one recovers [from each surgery] and keeps on living. You shouldn’t stop your life because of sarcoma.”
And she didn’t.
Through three subsequent operations, the most recent in January 2024 at City of Hope, McKelvey has surprised, astonished and yes, worried some people with her rapid comebacks, returning to her full schedule within weeks, graduating medical school, even going on a month-long medical rotation in Europe.
Difficult Decisions

Not that it’s been easy. Each surgery was more extensive. Eventually McKelvey surrendered a kidney, her gall bladder, part of her colon and her appendix.
Along the way, McKelvey’s sarcoma did indeed turn into the dedifferentiated variety, which does happen. By surgery No. 4 even Dr. Tseng was worried, unsure he could remove all the cancer. To try and shrink the tumor, McKelvey received two cycles of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin. She endured the typical side effects, fretting the most about her hair loss.
“I decided to just shave it all off,” she said. “And the hairdressers at City of Hope were phenomenal. They helped me at a very bad time.”
She has kind words for everyone at City of Hope, though she found the atmosphere on campus a little “surreal” at first.
“I don’t like being ‘the cancer girl,’” she said. “At other hospitals, no one knows why you’re there. But at City of Hope, everyone there has cancer, so right away people know.”
But she wouldn’t go anywhere else now, largely because of Dr. Tseng.
“I trust him. There’s no one else I’d rather have doing my surgery. And he’s a really nice guy.”
In the meantime, McKelvey says her cancer experience will make her a better doctor.
“One thousand percent,” she says. “I understand what it’s like to sit in that [patient’s] chair. It’s going to be great to teach, to say, ‘Hey, this is how I did it.’ [My disease] gives purpose to all this. If I can help folks in similar situations, that turns my negative into a positive.”
Dr. Tseng couldn’t agree more.
“I think she’s going to be a great doctor,” he said. “She’s smart, she’s been through living with a disease herself and she has a deeper understanding than most other physicians.”
It’s an ongoing story. Scans after the fourth surgery showed new growth once again. Tseng has explained, and McKelvey understands, that ultimately, sarcoma prevails. But they are now a strong team, determined to give McKelvey as much quality longevity as possible.
“She has many years ahead,” said Tseng, adding he can visualize her life “20 or 30 years from now.”
“And I’ll always be there,” he promised, “to allow her to live her fullest life.”