Pancreatic Cancer?

Just to clear up a couple of inaccuracies here - pancreatic cancer is not incurable. I’m living proof of that! Often it’s diagnosed too late to be treated but if it’s caught early enough it’s certainly able to be cured (surgery offers the only complete cure but chemo can keep it managed for years). It’s a difficult cancer to detect at the beginning and is not often diagnosed till it’s well established and therefore often untreatable.  You can live without a pancreas - a few people in my PC support group have had a total pancretectomy. It does mean living on a cocktail of drugs for life but it can be done. No other organ can take over from it though. Chronic pancreatitus is usually incurable once established and does raise the risk of pancreatic cancer as does having cystic fibrosis.

Any pains you’re unsure of should be checked out and bloods taken although in my case my bloods remained virtually normal so were no good for detecting my cancer. I had months of tests, mostly imaging ones, before I became severely ill and the tumour was finally detected. However, it was apparent very early on that there was something wrong with my pancreas as it showed up badly inflamed from the beginning - It just took a while for the cancer to be detected. I was quite ill for a long time but the surgery and chemo have rid me of the cancer now.