> In August 4th, I went into the MarinHealth Emergency Room, due to increased stomach pain on top of symptoms which became more acute in June. I've had a reduced appetite, with consequent weight loss, for about the last year. I had been fighting to keep weight on for some time, then in July, Rebecca and I went back to our usual haunt at the Hotel Wailea in Maui, which we love. Towards the end of the trip, I had a sudden and dramatic loss of appetite, more than the usual.

It’s incredible that someone could have such symptoms for a year and not a single doctor ordered an abdominal ultrasound. Given the outcome, this might have been a blessing, he was able to live his last year without knowing about the disease, which realistically isn’t curable. But at the same time, it could just as easily have been another abdominal tumor where a year’s delay would have made a huge difference.

May he rest in peace and bless his family.

▲ Findecanor 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Don't underestimate human incompetence and pettiness. I have a similar story, and now have to live with an ostomy and chronic latent cancer that could flare up at any time.

▲ canucker2016 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Especially given that (from his FAQ 'You seem oddly calm about this.' )

  "I first was confronted with my prospective early mortality back when I contracted Hodgkin's Disease (and later ITP) in my 20's and early 30's."

A cancer survivor who is losing weight for unknown reasons should set off alarm bells.

▲ tedggh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You always need different opinions. It took me three different doctors to finally get the prescription for cancer screening due to family history. One would thing this kind of stuff is protocol but many times it is subjective, completely up to the doctor's opinion. For doctor 1 it may not be alarming enough and for doctor #3 crazy you didn't start the screenings 5 years ago. That was my experience, and this was at the same hospital network in the same city.

▲ xunil2ycom 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Did he see a doctor about it before the ER visit? This is a good reminder to not shrug off things like unplanned weight loss - see your physician!

▲ dcminter 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Pancreatic cancer can be curable in some cases - see the Whipple procedure:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy

That said, it would depend on several other factors, not least catching the tumour early enough - and it looks like a pretty tough thing to go through even if successful.

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4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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seabass-labrax 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Gregg chose not to undergo surgery:

> This is major life-changing surgery with a long and difficult "recovery". I have elected not to do this, due to existing co-morbidities from my sorted past and the expectation that the recovery would exceed my lifespan, which I'd rather keep as normal as possible.

I wish I'd known about that post before he died; I'd have sent him my best regards personally rather than just saying nice things about him online now :(

	▲	dcminter 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ah, I missed that bit, thanks. My dad had (and died) of pancreatic cancer and it was too far gone for Whipple to be on the table. However I think he too might not have chosen to go ahead with it even if it had been an option. My dad lived for two or thee years after diagnosis, mostly with fairly good QoL. He did have "NanoKnife" which seems to have helped extend things without much negative impact so that's worth looking into for those in a similar plight. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_electroporation
	▲	westurner 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		/? pancreatic: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pancreatic Thanks for JSON-LD (and YAML-LD) and your contributions to so many W3C specifications over mailing lists and ReSpec specification documents! Now I'll have to finish a PR to pydantic_schemaorg to build data validators for Linked Data that - by conforming to W3C Standards - enables industry and research to describe all of the things in a giant LODcloud. yml2vocab also processes RDFS vocabularies. JSON-LD, for example, makes it possible for all of us to find the website URL and phone number and business hours and accessibility info for an Organization > LocalBusiness Place on the map with :latitude and :longitude fields, find and annotate CreativeWorks, ScholarlyArticles, PDF DigitalDocuments, SoftwareApplications, FHIR JSON-LD,. JSON-LD foregoes XML parser complexity (and vulns), but because JSON-LD maps to RDF with an @context, you can use vocab URIs for XML XSD types like xsd:boolean and xsd:float64 and so on. But there's yet no standard way to express a complex number like 0.8+0.8j with XSD or RDF or JSON-LD.