Diagnosis

This is our mother, Kyung Wha Jhong, about a week before her Whipple Procedure. Mom was born on 1/1/1936. She and Dad had just moved to Virginia in February after our father retired from working in Korea. We were happy that they were finally in the US and our family had been planning to celebrate her 70th birthday with a nice trip to Los Cabos, Mexico. Somehow, we always have bad luck with trips to Mexico. On our Dad's 70th birthday we had tried to go to Cancun. But our mother's mother had turned ill and we had to cancel the trip. So this is the second time this has happened and we have decided never to go to Mexico for a family vacation again (bad luck).

Mom had been experiencing stomach pain since April of 2005. This slowly got worse and the pain also spread to her lower back. Her appetite decreased and she lost about 10 or so pounds by the time she was diagnosed in November. We tried early on to prod her to see a Doctor but she was resistant since my father and her were so busy with the relocation. She finally got around to seeing a general practitioner in July who referred her on to Dr. Hong, a gastro doctor. Dr. Hong recommended an endoscopy and a colonoscopy but refused to perform them until my mother received clearance from a heart doctor. She has suffered from some valve problems for many years. So my mother and father had to find a new heart doctor in the area and get a clearance letter. My mother finally had the procedures done in late October and the Doctor said she was very "clean". So my mother asked why she had the pain and she mentioned that a doctor in Korea had thought she might have gallstones. In response to this, Dr. Hong recommended and ordered a CT scan.

The results came back on November 9. I was in Mexico at the time on vacation and my sister Linda called me with the bad news. My radiologist brother-in-law Mike was on the trip with me and mentioned that pancreatic cancer was pretty grim. We found the horrible stats on survival rates for this disease (4% 5-year survival). We were all shocked and felt a lot of sadness that day.