What Pancreatic Cancer Medical Professionals Taught Me About Mental Resilience

Several years ago, I lost my husband Mike to pancreatic cancer. Since then, I have had the privilege of serving as president of the governing board of Sky Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises awareness of pancreatic cancer and funds promising research into the disease.

This role has given me plenty of reasons to hope for progress. If I’m honest, it has also given me plenty of reasons to be impatient for it.

Pancreatic cancer has been one of the deadliest cancers for far too long. While there have been periods of optimism about early detection and treatment, the five-year survival rate remains stubbornly low, at just 13%.

Recently, we held Sky Foundation’s annual Night Sky Gala, our largest fundraising event. This year’s theme was “Illuminating a Path for Breakthroughs,” and the evening was filled with reasons for optimism. We heard about promising new treatments, research and techniques that could give people diagnosed with the disease more time. We were also able to share news of a new drug that, in clinical trials, roughly doubled survival for some patients.

That alone is extremely exciting, but I left thinking about something else: the resilience and perseverance of the medical professionals and scientists in the room.

The researchers, physicians and surgeons there have chosen careers in which progress can be painfully slow. Researchers test hypothesis after hypothesis, knowing that many will fail or fall short. Physicians and surgeons regularly have conversations none of us would want to have: telling someone they have pancreatic cancer, that their treatment options are limited, or that surgery is not possible.

Perhaps that is what resilience really looks like. It isn’t ignoring difficult realities or assuming everything will turn out the way we hope. It is confronting those realities honestly and still believing progress is possible. It is experiencing setbacks without allowing them to become stopping points. It is continuing to search, test, learn and try again.

The people who understand the difficulty better than almost anyone were among the most hopeful people in the room that night. That stayed with me.

We all face moments in our lives and careers when progress feels too slow, when the answer remains elusive, or when something we believed would work simply doesn’t. In those moments, I hope I remember what I experienced at the Night Sky Gala: hope grounded not in certainty, but in perseverance.

The researchers, physicians and surgeons fighting pancreatic cancer reminded me that optimism isn’t the belief that the next attempt will necessarily succeed. It’s the belief that the work is worth continuing until one does.