This makes me sad. When I was getting chemo for breast cancer a man was in the chair next to me. His wife came in with his three kids - looked to range from 12- 19 or so. They were joking and laughing and they left and we started talking and he told me he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer but he thought he could beat it. I went home and cried in the shower that night. I think once cancer touches your life you are just so emotional about it. I just hate it so much. We should be able to do more. Why can’t we do more?
So sad. Naturally, I pray he’s the one in a million who can survive but already I’m thinking wow, there is no one who can ever replace him. 
There are many many labs working and collaborating on researching this disease. It is a real stinker of a disease. However, government funding cuts from the last 10 years or so are having an effect on bench research.
This news saddens me.
From the day my daughter was born we would use the end of Jeopardy as her bedtime. She used to sit with me and her grandparents every night and watch Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy. She once told her grandma “come on Ooma, Uncle Alex is on!”
Alright ‘Uncle Alex’ we’ll keep those candles lit. You’ve got a contract to uphold!
This really hurts. Sometimes I think I’ve spent more of my life with Alex Trebek–with some exceptions, thirty minutes, five nights a week for 34+ years–than I have with any other non-family member! It’s so revealing of his place in American pop culture that he rightfully felt he had to tell us himself via video rather than rely on a press release.
This is so sad. Wishing the best for Alex as he fights this. I’m a Jeopardy fanatic - I wouldn’t cut the cord on cable TV until I was sure the indoor antenna could get the station Jeopardy is on. One of S1’s first words was “Ack”, his pronunciation of Alex.
Another fan of him. Physician here. Unfortunately there are cancers that are hard to detect- ovarian is another. There can be screening tests for many things but everything has a cost. Testing everyone for everything requires resources our society will never have. Plus false positives that lead to anguish and using resources individuals lack. In a perfect world we would have all of the answers, cures et al.
Life isn’t fair. Some get to live until they are 90 plus, others fall long before. He is such a nice guy we all want him to be healthy for a lot longer- some selfishness as we enjoy his TV show. My biggest thought is the pain- heart disease is easier.
His attitude is fantastic. He intends to fight it and knows the odds. I expect him to make wise choices as time goes on- knowing when to keep the treatment and when to let go.
Steve Jobs also had pancreatic cancer. All the money and technical know how isn’t always enough.
My mother died from pancreatic cancer, she lived 6 months from diagnosis. She was 54. I’ve been bugging my primary care doctor to test me for it every year, but there’s really nothing definite now unlike colon cancer’s colonosopy.
Pancreatic cancer is one disease that the detection and treatment have made little progress since my mother’s death 35 years ago.
@Chevda said:
According to his biographer, Steve Jobs had a rare type of pancreatic cancer that could have been treated successfully with surgery. He refused the surgery, saying he didn’t want to be “cut on.” Nine months later, he did agree to the surgery.
His wife later said he engaged in “magical thinking,” believing eating a certain diet and trying homeopathic remedies would cure him. Though it’s impossible to know for sure if having the surgery when he was diagnosed would have made a difference, his wife asserted that he came to regret his choices.
To be accurate, Steve Jobs had pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, a form of cancer where survival is often measured in years (8 in his case). In contrast, Michael Landon and Patrick Swayze had the more common exocrine tumor, where survival is measured in months (3 and 12 in these cases).
Skieurope, if you haven’t yet been a contestant on Jeopardy, you should be.
I had a CT scan last fall for an unrelated issue and the radiologist saw what she thought was a 5 mm neuroendocrine tumor on my pancreas. Took a month to get an endoscopy to get a closer look. The pancreas doc is from Hopkins and uses endoscopy to less-invasively get at all kinds of things, including pancreatic masses. It was the longest and most terrifying month of my life. I was shaken in a way that my leukemia and cardiac arrest never, ever approached, and I am still struggling a lot. It sounds crazy, but I have never questioned my survival over the past 17 years til they said pancreatic tumor.
The doc who did the endoscopy to get a biopsy never bothered to look at the CD (which I had brought to the consult appointment) to see exactly what he was looking for, but he told DH and me they saw nothing. This just infuriated and terrified me even more and has left me feeling like this still isn’t resolved. At the followup appointment last month he did look at the CD, at my insistence, and didn’t see anything, He thinks the radiologist overread the CT scan. I’m still not convinced. I’m due for a colonoscopy and the pancreas guy has recommended I get another upper endoscopy while I’m knocked out. Something is going on; we just don’t know what.
Have read that he’s responding extremely well to treatment and his tumors are shrinking!
Sending best wishes to him! A good friend died of this last month–so fast, he didn’t even have a definitive diagnosis yet. I’ve never seen anything like it. Looks like Trebek will at least get some time from the treatment, and who knows, maybe beat the odds.
“But for pancreatic cancer, no major professional groups currently recommend routine screening in people who are at average risk. This is because no screening test has been shown to lower the risk of dying from this cancer.”
There are earlier detection methods being tested for pancreatic and many other dread diseases. But they’re in the learning stages and the low accuracy rates/excessively high cost mean it’s no easy decision to use them, yet. I’m aware of one syndrome where the cost tops 20k but the test detection success rate is 4% or so. 96% inaccurate.
We think of all the advances in medicine, but forget how much isn’t yet known.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/detection-diagnosis-staging/detection.html
One of our friends died from it last year. He survived three years after the diagnosis, and he made good use of the time. He spent a lot of time with his kids, all young adults. He stayed positive the whole time. His wife is in my book club and she’s done well, considering. I really admire both of them.
This local woman, an artist, painted portraits of others with various forms of cancer. She actually passed away from her breast cancer only weeks before her exhibit. She said something that really resonated with me - when you have cancer, you often hide the tears behind a smile. So many people ask how you are and you can’t help but protect them and yourself. But if you’re part of “the club” you can see the pain behind the smile - it’s in the eyes.
I hope Mr Trebek beats the odds.
In the case of our loved one’s battle with cancer, she responded VERY well to treatment initially. The tumors shrunk so much that she went from stage 4 to stage 0-1. She was able to attend our S’s graduation, which she very much wanted to attend. Sadly, the cancer came back with a vengeance and treatment was increasingly ineffective. She never made it to D’s graduation less than 2 years later.
Cancer is a very unpredictable disease–where treatment can work great–until it doesn’t.
I have a friend who was diagnosed today. She had been complaining of a pain just under her rib cage for a few months. It got so bad during the last month that she had to move in with her mother and is confined to a wheelchair. It took doctors over 2 months to make the diagnosis.