Patrick Swayze

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not exactly celebrity-obsessed. All of us with pancreatic cancer, though, feel connected to Patrick Swayze. I was diagnosed at about the same time as he was, and like him, I was unable to have the Whipple procedure. Over the past 18 months I've followed his situation through the media and through the pancreatic cancer forums, which pick over any scraps of information like archeologists trying to determine the shape of a pot through a few scratched shards.

A typical conversation on the forums went like this:
"Does anyone know what treatment Patrick Swayze is getting?"
"He's being treated at Stanford, so he's probably getting something better than the rest of us."
"They say it's experimental."
"Don't be an idiot, the govt only oks Gemzar and Tarceva, so anything else is experimental, it doesn't mean he's getting better treatment than we are."
"I wish he was on the boards so he could tell us."
"Give the man his privacy, who wants to suffer in public?"

It was a combination of knowledgeable and sympathetic. Today the boards have reflected posters' feelings of personal loss. For us, he was not just a wonderful dancer and a great entertainer. He was one of us, in part important because he was a public face of the disease. We run through our poster boys rather fast, and he's been the most famous one since Randy Pausch died last year. More than that, though, he went through what we go through. Chemo was not easier for him because he was famous, and the best doctors at Stanford weren't able to make the Whipple possible for him.

He was a piece of the continent that is pancreatic cancer, and all of us hear the sound of the bell tolling.