How I Found Out I had Pancreatic Cancer - Matthew | The Patient Story

liver. So things weren't looking good. He wasn't at this point, he wasn't sure it would be some special case, some kind of miracle. I just thought, you know, this is it, this is it. But my oncologist switched me to a different chemotherapy cocktail. And I must say that I was very relieved because, after almost six months, I am no longer afraid. In fact, it was that day that the neuropathy had gotten so bad that I couldn't get up from a chair on my own, like I needed my friend to pick me up. And I was pretty thin at this point.

And yes, it was miserable. So when he told me, it's not working, you don't have to do it today, honestly, I was very grateful. He told me, I don't remember how my oncologist phrased that, but he told me that there was a cocktail that some doctors or researchers had

found

was promising for people in my situation. So I think it was young people, aka people, but it may also have been people with

pancreatic

cancer

who are also carriers of the mutation. And it was a cocktail of gemcitabine, ABRAXANE and cisplatin. And honestly, it was like, I mean, my quality of life improved drastically.

I'm happy to say that by the time my first set of scans arrived, at around three months, some of the spots on my liver had started to disappear. So I do three more months of chemotherapy. And honestly, I made it through the team, didn't lose my hair, and maintained a beauty like I was six feet tall. I was 215 years old when I was diagnosed. I maintained a healthy weight thanks to this cocktail. Miraculously, I'm very grateful for that because he let them know that at the time I thought I was still dying, you know, sooner rather than later.

So I was trying to have fun. But in March 2021, you know, three months later, he looked at my scans and said, yeah, I don't like it outside of the tumor. They weren't if, if memory serves, they couldn't identify my

cancer

outside of the tumor. In fact, almost a year later, they tried another Whipple and this time it was successful. And it's not that he has had little success. It wasn't like we bought it, you know, there's some cancer around here. But we gave it some time, like everyone else, my God, I'm not a doctor. So the medical language escapes me.

But there I was when Dr. Allen came into my hospital room to tell me everything was dead. The tumor, I believe, is as he described it. He said again and again: I was, you know, in Dilaudid. So take this for what it's worth. But he said the tumor, I think he said dead and that, you know, all my margins were good and all the lymph nodes they tested were negative. So I got something I really didn't expect at this point. They, you know, before this, they couldn't see any cancer on the CT scan. or MRI. But that didn't mean my peritoneum wasn't covered in cancer.

That just meant that they wouldn't be able to know until they got there. And when they got there, they were pleasantly surprised that everything had worked. You know, this last scan was much smoother than others. But it is incredibly difficult. But for those of you watching at home, the chances of him living those six years are astronomically small. Pancreatic cancer has a remarkably low five-year survival rate. And I mean, my goodness, I mean, this year there was news that the survival rate for

pancreatic

adenocarcinoma p C increased to 13% or something like that. So you're unlikely to see that much time, at least on paper.

I think it's important to remember that if there's one thing you can take away from my

story

, it's that you're not the statistic, you really aren't. And you know, I was diagnosed with something I wasn't supposed to have at my age, it's very unlikely. And then when I had that improbable thing, it was supposed to kill me and I didn't die. And so, in a sense, I beat the odds not once, but twice. So if you're going to believe anyone on that, you're not your stats front. It should be me. I'm just going to make that claim.

I have been without evidence of recurrent metastatic disease in my body for 18 months. It is important to remember that you are not the statistic. I think that's a conclusion. Another conclusion is that the treatment is not linear. Pancreatic cancer is often thought of in linear terms as a short, fast trajectory to death. And our assumption is that if the treatment is going to work, it works right away and that, you know, there's not a step back or a step forward. And that, in my experience, is not true. Sometimes things get worse before they get better, and that's no reason to get discouraged.

Half the drink in the cheeseburger live your life, you know, to the extent that you can. That's how I lived.