Pancreatic cancer,……less than 5 percent of those diagnosed are still alive five years after diagnosis

This thread isn’t about me. I am fine. It is a short story about my younger sister,…who is fine.

I wanted to start a thread about cancer which might help someone who has some form of it, maybe diagnosed with it, knows someone who has it or as in this case was misdiagnosed (or better yet,…readings on a test that pointed towards pancreatic cancer because the patient was on certain meds).

A week before the summer started, I get an e-mail from my sister who informs me she has been getting test results showing a sign that she might have pancreatic cancer and to keep it to myself.

Questions start, is she in any pain, how far along is it, how can it be stopped, what are success rates after chemo. I look it up and read this,………………….

“less than 5 percent of those diagnosed are still alive five years after diagnosis”

I think,……. Will she be one of the lucky ones whose cancer goes into complete remission? Will she even do Chemo? What can I do?

I write her back and tell her what I have found out and she informs me she knows and that’s why she’s telling me. The both of us co-manage a few things and this news will require me to go back to the states and she was giving me a heads-up.

Many e-mails pass between us for the next few days and I find out that she has been tested a few times with the same results and is considering new tests after the summer (school break). She summers in Pennsylvania with her boyfriend and doesn’t want to start new tests with a new primary care physician away from home (Central Florida).

I am thinking why aren’t you taking this more seriously? But I don’t want to push her.

Summer passes and most of my questions are answered. I don’t think she would have done the chemo with this type of cancer.

I plead with her to tell our mother and she does reluctantly. My mother gets to work on solving the problem after she gets more facts.
She finds out her daughter has been doing a corticosteroid because of a shoulder injury (she hurt her shoulder while pregnancy testing some young cattle so the doctor prescribed a steroid to help with her healing) and taking corticosteroids can cause amylase to rise in blood tests.


High amylase results in your blood can point to a problem with your pancreas, cancer being one problem.

Couple conversations with her primary care physician and visits (maybe some more tests after she stops the steroids for a while) and tada,..no test results pointing to cancer (high amylase levels). Needless to say she’s looking for a new primary care physician.

I did not know taking a steroid would have this type of effect on blood tests,…….resulting in a false (not really false) reading indicating you might have cancer.

Hope this type of information and more like it (new drugs, new technology information, good ending stories as above from other TD members) will help someone else down the road, reading this thread.