After Patrick Swayze died from complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife Lisa Niemi Swayze, vowed to spread awareness about the silent killer.
Since his death in 2009, Niemi Swayze has worked tirelessly to not only keep her late husband’s memory alive, but to warn others about the symptoms of pancreatic cancer.
Patrick Swayze cancer symptoms
“I still care and I know how tough Patrick’s and my journey was with this,” she said. “Cancer may have taken him, but it didn’t beat him. And I’m continuing his fight for him.”
Swayze was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, and in less than two years he was dead.
Niemi Swayze, who remarried in 2014, said the actor’s first symptoms were yellow eyes and digestive problems.
”He came to me and he said, ‘Do my eyes look yellow?’” she told TODAY.
He wanted to wait to visit the doctor, but Niemi Swayze insisted they go the following day because “yellow eyes just doesn’t sound normal.”
”We went to the doctor and the moment he looked at him and saw what was going on, he sent us immediately for a CT scan.”
Patrick Swayze pancreatic cancer
”Then we had a grueling 24 hours to wait while we got the reports back. It was a really tough time. Your life just turns on a dime,” she recalled.
An endoscopic procedure confirmed Swayze had pancreatic cancer.
Since pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult to treat, Niemi Swayze recalls most doctors prepared patients for the end. But the couple refused to accept the death sentence.
”We fought it for as long as his body could. It was a tough journey, but it was worth it. When you love someone and they’re on this Earth with you, every moment is precious. Every bit of fight we did was worth it for that extra time.”
Many thought that it was Swayze’s continuous smoking habit that had killed him. During his cancer treatment, Swayze continued to work – and smoke.
“I’ve seriously cut down,” Patrick told Barbara Walters. “I was one of those dumb ones that started back in the Marlborough Man days whose — you know, it was cool. I’m a cowboy. But I’ll tell you one thing. I will talk so hard core against, against smoking for kids. That’s one reason I’ve never smoked in front of children.”
Yet, according to his doctor, that wasn’t the case. Instead, he saw it as “quite an accomplishment” that Swayze survived as long as two years with the condition.
”I think at the point that one is already diagnosed with cancer, there’s little additional harm in it,” Dr. Fisher said. “And if it — it seems to provide him some comfort or partly identity of who he is, I certainly have no objections to that.”
