Pancreatic cancer

Hi

This is such a shock for you and your wife.  There’s help available from Macmillan and if you have a Maggie’s Centre near you, they provide great support.  if you live in Scotland, Cancer Support Scotland provide wellbeing support to those affected by cancer.
You may find the Pancreatic cancer forum  helps too as there will be others with the same diagnosis.

There may be treatment available as although Pancreatic Cancer is more difficult to treat, there are treatments which can give good results.  I found it helped me to focus on things I could control so getting information helped me as well as things that distracted me, even for a short time.

Take care!

Hi Pope, I am so sorry to hear your diagnosis, my husband and I have also recently been knocked down by this unexpected news. Our story is that following some out of range blood results and an urgent CT scan, my husband got the news on 2nd December from our gp that he too has Pancreatic Cancer. His is stage 4 and has spread to other organs. We couldn’t have ever envisioned that we would receive such devastating news on a Friday night so we do really understand your emotions

in terms of some practical info, The process we have gone through since then is that this information was passed on to the hepatitis biliary pancreatic (HBP) team at the hospital and his case was discussed at the weekly multidisciplinary team meeting. This team includes medical, surgical, radiologists etc and based on the info they have they decide the options available and the potential next steps for each individual. The next steps for my husband was he had an endoscopic ultrasound scan with a biopsy. We were told that the biopsy will confirm specifically what type of cancer it is and will enable any treatment to be specific (plus we were told in the case of pancreatic cancer it allows access to more chemo options that can only be approved if a biopsy is done). My husband was advised to take Creon (which are tablets that help breakdown your food) as soon as possible and we went to the gp to get a prescription soonest. 
We actually made direct contact with the HBP team cancer nurse specialist team by finding their details on our local hospital website and this helped us get support from very early on. We now have an appointment with the consultant next week to discuss biopsy results and confirm treatment options before hopefully commencing chemo a few days later. I hope some of this practical information is of use. Sending much love