It took my dad last year, diagnosis in April, gone by mid-June. It was so aggressive he chose "medical assistance in death" (MAID), because he didn't want to be in hospitals all-the-time. He had half-completed the process, then had a stroke on June 4th, where he was then admitted to hospital. The stroke cause aphasia, so he couldn't communicate very well (speech was very disjointed, but he could understand everyone) - they brough in a speech pathologist, after a couple weeks they we able to confirm that he still wanted 'MAID', so - I had to make the decision as to when. (And - I agreed, spending time in hospitals, fighting the inevitable was antithetic to his whole personality)

Cleared by 2nd round of medical professionals to make the MAID decision on a Wednesday, so - we scheduled for Friday - he passed away naturally Thursday morning.

Note that it really depends on the type of the pancreatic cancer. While pancreatic adenocarcinomas are some of the worst cancers out there (overall 5y survival of 8%), others like pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours have a fairly good prognosis. Famously, Steve Jobs sought alternative medicine solutions to the latter, which was probably misguided.

A friend of mine survived it, I wouldn't wish pancreatic cancer on even my enemies. That stuff is tough. I do the Purple Stride with her every year to celebrate her battle.

RIP Kevin, hearing your stories and the movie Hackers was a huge inspiration in me getting into what we do.

A friend of mine who is a surgeon originally was learning to become a pancreatic cancer surgeon. She changed to GI because the mortality rate was just so high and so fast that it was extremely heartbreaking and depressing.

I'm sorry to hear about your mom. It's not impossible to cure, but it's very uncommon. I think that if it is caught early, only 10% of people eventually become disease-free.

My mom's situation was almost exactly the same. Our family has a history of cancer and it turned out she had the harmful BRCA2 variant.

Were you offered any kind of genetic testing?

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/geneti...

:-(. Always sad to hear such news. Stay strong mate!

There is some reason to hope, tho regrettably too late for your family:

https://www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrna-vaccines-fight-pancreati...

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...