In hindsight, pancreatic cancer reared its ugly head with subtle early signs

My father died more than 4 years ago from pancreatic cancer. Unfortunately, my father’s first sign of this cancer (he woke up jaundiced) was also the final stage of this horrible disease. All cancers are terrible, but pancreatic cancer goes one step further. The first noticeable symptoms of it are usually the final ones. Looking back, I realize that my family and I received many clues that my father’s health was changing. Unfortunately, none of us noticed those signs in time.

One of the first signs of pancreatic cancer is abdominal pain, which often radiates to the back. My father did not have radiating back pain, rather he suffered from a dull, aching pain. Since he had always had back problems that led to surgery years before, he dismissed this as nothing serious. He began sessions with a chiropractor, who tried to relieve the constant pain.

Another symptom that was overlooked was her weight loss. He had always been a giant of a man and usually kept his weight at 240. He began to lose weight, but insisted that he was tired of his belly being his table and wanted to lose pounds. I think he really felt that what he was saying was true, but the underlying cause is what convinced me that pancreatic cancer was rearing its ugly head very early on.

Around the beginning of 2003, my father started to be a picky eater. Nothing grossly peculiar, but for a man who sat down and enjoyed every hearty meal, suddenly some of his favorite foods just didn’t taste right. He would ask my mom to try the bite and, although she told him that he was fine, he insisted that it tasted strange or that it was not well prepared.

In hindsight, the different taste of my dad’s food was a great sign that his health was changing, but it certainly wasn’t the biggest clue we got and didn’t notice. My dad was a beer drinker his whole life. He drank beer every day. I don’t want him to sound like a bum on the tracks, but he worked hard and played hard. He liked beer with his meals. He enjoyed the beer after mowing the lawn. He enjoyed the beer watching his soccer games. He was a beer drinking guy.

Imagine to our amazement, when he just stopped drinking it. She just didn’t care about the taste anymore and he drank water or diet cola with his meals. That still didn’t give us a clue and masked the clue to lose weight. Since my father didn’t drink beer, it was a given that he was going to lose weight. Thus, we lost another valuable clue that my father’s health was changing. All of this was approximately 1 year prior to his diagnosis.

Another sign we didn’t recognize was that my dad was constantly eating peanuts. He couldn’t get enough of them. Shortly before his skin turned jaundiced, his entire body began to itch. I have since learned that the itching was due to bile salt crystals accumulating under her skin. The tumor was in the head of the pancreas and, unknown to us, was already blocking his bile duct. I don’t know where peanuts fit in other than their salt content. He might have been craving salt since it was accumulating in his skin tissue instead of being distributed throughout his body, but I just assumed that.

I’m not in the medical field, but I’ve been obsessed with funding pancreatic cancer and trying to find early detection. Pancreatic cancer is a silent killer and the deadliest of all cancers. I hope that by writing this article you can make your readers aware of some very subtle changes in health that were obviously noticed in my dad’s case, but that we don’t notice or process as important or needing our immediate attention.