Join battle against cancer

Grief is a peculiar animal.

Like a tiger stalking its prey, grief pounces on a person who thinks they are fine, at the most inopportune times.

It sneaks up on you days, weeks and even months after something terrible has happened and gut punches you just to make sure you remember that it happened.

The five stages of grief are even more peculiar.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance can take years to go through.

For some, the steps move quickly, while for others they linger, bouncing back and forth between two steps.

That seems to be the case for me when I think about my best friend's mom who passed away almost five months ago from a very short battle with pancreatic cancer.

I am fine most of the time, but then I see a post or picture that makes me remember what the world has lost when she passed away and I get angry.

Angry at medicine for not finding this disease before it had spread so far in her body.

Angry at God for taking her from her family.

And then just as quickly as my anger appears, it melts into sadness because her story is one of many who have been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and lost their battle a short time later.

This type of cancer has one of the lowest five-year survival rates of all the cancers, with only 8 percent living that long.

And of all who are diagnosed, a surprising 74 percent will die within the first year after diagnosis and most likely within six months.

Why in today's advanced medical fields is this type of cancer so deadly?

I wonder that today and I will wonder that tomorrow.

But for now, until medical advancements happen, we need to educate ourselves and our loved ones because an estimated 53,070 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year and just under 42,000 will die from it.

Pancreatic cancer may cause only vague symptoms that could indicate many different conditions within the abdomen or gastrointestinal tract. Symptoms include pain (usually abdominal or back pain), weight loss, jaundice, loss of appetite, nausea, changes in stool and diabetes. But these symptoms are usually symptoms for other issues as well, masking a proper diagnosis until it is too late.

We also need to get angry and stand up and fight.

We need to take up the charge for those who have lost their battle by raising money for research, much like breast cancer coalitions did years ago, and look at where they stand today.

In 2014, over 230,000 new cases of breast cancer were diagnosed in the United States, and many of those will have at least a 99 percent five-year survival rate if it has not spread to other organs.

So let's be like the breast cancer coalitions.

I challenge you, lift up a torch in honor of those who lost their battle to pancreatic cancer and fight to end it because you never know if it will be you or a loved one who it steals next.