Roughly 50% of people diagnosed die within three months
The daughters of a couple who both died of pancreatic cancer are sharing their parents’ story to help others in “knowing what different symptoms to look out for” when it comes to the “deadliest common cancer”. Rebekah Stubbs, 44, a former primary school teacher, and Laura Smith, 36, a nurse, said their mother Susan Smith died of pancreatic cancer in February 2012, while their father Richard Smith died of the same disease in October 2023.
According to Pancreatic Cancer UK, roughly 50% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer die within three months, which is something Rebekah and Laura said they have witnessed first-hand after their mother and father died within six months and three months, respectively.
Rebekah told PA Real Life: “Not only did mum die of it, but then dad did too. You couldn’t write it.” Laura added: “They weren’t smokers and they weren’t drinkers. They probably had a bit of whiskey every so often, but they went to a fitness club and looked after themselves.
“They didn’t have risk factors that you’d think ‘that could be why’. They were both health-conscious people, but yet both then developed pancreatic cancer.” Looking back on their relationship with their parents, Rebekah said they had a “really loving, close-knit family” and her mother was her “best friend”, while Laura said they were “supportive with anything that we wanted to do”.
The daughters noticed a change in their mother around the summer of 2011, when Rebekah said Susan “kept swallowing like she’d got something stuck in the back of her throat” and was “really thirsty” all the time, while Laura added their mother was experiencing “acid reflux” and generally felt “not well in herself”.
Rebekah said Susan started going “backwards and forwards” to the doctor, who initially prescribed antacids that Laura added “didn’t seem to help”. Within weeks, Rebekah said Susan’s symptoms worsened, including “going to the loo” a lot with “tummy issues”, which her mother put down to irritable bowel syndrome, as well as difficulty eating, yellowing of the skin, and nausea.
Susan had an ultrasound and was formally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in October 2011. Laura said: “Because mum was a nurse, I remember her looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘I look and I feel as if I’ve got something nasty going on’, (and) she was right.”
“They basically said that she’d got a tumour on the head of her pancreas and it had spread to the bile ducts, which was causing her to be yellow because they were blocked,” she added. Laura said her mother had surgery to fit a stent in either side of her bile ducts to try to stop the jaundice, then a “couple of rounds of chemotherapy” that made Susan “so poorly and unwell”.
By Christmas, Rebekah said Susan could not keep “anything down” and was struggling to “get on top of the pain medication”, which escalated significantly after she experienced bloating and swelling around her abdomen that she needed to have drained.
Laura said: “It was quite a sudden death. She had been sitting in bed and talking to us and been quite content. And then, unfortunately, she had a big seizure and passed away quite unexpectedly. Dad had actually gone to have a look around a hospice for mum. Then he returned and mum was no longer here. That must have been very difficult to understand what just happened,” she added.
After Susan died in February 2012, aged 55, Rebekah and Laura said they took on the responsibility of caring for their maternal grandmother who had dementia, and who died in February 2022. Within a year of losing their grandmother, Laura said her father started experiencing back pain on his right side, for which he saw a physiotherapist and tried to “go down the correct route of going to your GP”.
He had blood taken and, despite seeing a physiotherapist, Laura said his back pain was “getting progressively worse”.
After months of inaction from Richard’s doctors, Laura said she told her father that “we need to do something about it”, so she took him to A&E in July 2023 where they waited 12 hours to be seen. This is when a further blood test and scans confirmed Richard “had something going on with his liver”, which an endoscopic biopsy of his liver would later confirm was pancreatic cancer.
“So dad was then faced with going through everything that his wife did,” Laura said, after Richard’s diagnosis in July 2023. “And then knowing what may lie ahead.”
Laura said their father had pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy, which helped him digest food, and was due to start palliative chemotherapy. But by the end of August, Richard was driving his van when he had an accident after what doctors initially believed to be a stroke, which was later revealed to be cancer metastasising in his brain.
After this incident, Rebekah said: “His personality wasn’t even the same. He seemed to lose his mobility. He was really weak too. He couldn’t even put his Pin in his mobile phone.”
Laura added that her father’s decline was “so much quicker” than her mother’s because it had spread to his brain, meaning treatment options were “really limited”. She said it also meant he became “aggressive and challenging”, remarking that “he’d never been like that before”.
Richard died in October 2023, aged 70, just three months after his diagnosis. In the aftermath of Richard’s death, Rebekah said she wanted to do something to raise awareness about pancreatic cancer, so she wrote to Pancreatic Cancer UK to tell them about her family’s story.
Rebekah said: “I suppose it’s part of my grieving process.” On why it is important for her to share their parents’ stories, Rebekah explained: “Misdiagnoses, awareness, quicker pathways (to diagnosis), and knowing what different symptoms to look out for.”
According to the NHS, the main symptoms of pancreatic cancer are yellowing of the skin or eyes, itchy skin, change in toilet habits, loss of appetite, losing weight without trying to, fatigue, a high temperature, nausea and indigestion.
The sisters said they felt encouraged by Pancreatic Cancer UK’s announcement last year that the charity is funding a world-first new clinical study that could detect pancreatic cancer through a breath test.
Laura said: “Hopefully, that’ll be successful. It’s a quicker route (to diagnosis) than surgery and that’s got to be positive.”
She added: “In terms of our circumstances, I think it’s certainly unusual to have both parents diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They’re not related. They’ve got different genetics. It’s hard and really tough that neither one of them survived.”
To donate to Pancreatic Cancer UK, visit their website here: pancreaticcancer.org.uk/donate/
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