The story begins:

The lives of those in the Gordon Ehler family has been on quite a roller coaster ride since October 9^th, 2009 when my family doctor told Jo & I that I probably had liver cancer. I kind of knew that something wasn’t right when my doctor had tears in his eyes. Because my tests, health and blood work all showed normal we didn’t suspect cancer. I did ok until Jo started to cry. At that point I suspected that my life would never be the same. I was right!

It all started with a severe pain in my lower left back and pain under my left ribs on Father’s Day. The pain would vary and most of the time over the counter medicines helped. By the time I decided to visit the doctors it was September. Jo knew that something was wrong as did I, but we figured it was probably the return of ulcers. I was amazed at how many disorders I found as I did research that mimicked my symptoms. My doctor ordered the usual colonoscopy, and an ultrasound of the abdomen because of the possibility of gallbladder problems. If he had not done that we still might not know what was really wrong. When he saw lesions on my liver some benign tumors were suspected. The follow up CT scan lead to a liver biopsy. The rest is history.

After meeting with a couple of cancer docs and some scans I was told that I had pancreatic cancer. The cancer had spread from my pancreas to my liver. A radiologist said that I probably had around 20 tumors in my liver. I’m in stage 4 since the cancer has spread to other organs. Both of the docs told me that the disease was terminal. Estimates of how long I had to live range out to a year. I have learned that only 20% last that long and 2%-5% make it to 5 years.