By The Associated Press
Former Nebraska U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse on Tuesday said he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
Sasse, 53, made the announcement on social media, saying he learned of the disease last week and is “now marching to the beat of a faster drummer.”
“This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase,” Sasse wrote. “Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.”
Sasse was first elected to the Senate in 2014 and won reelection in 2020. He resigned in 2023 to serve as the president of the University of Florida after a contentious approval process. He left that post the following year after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.
Sasse was an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, and he was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict the former president of “incitement of insurrection” after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard, St. John’s College and Yale, worked as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. He then served as president of Midland University before he ran for the Senate. Midland is a small Christian university in eastern Nebraska.
Sasse and his wife have three children, the youngest of whom is in high school.
“I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more,” Sasse wrote. “Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived.”
Pancreatic cancer has a notably low survival rate. For the most common type, 11% of patients are alive five years after diagnosis, according to the Mayo Clinic.
It’s hard to catch in an early stage because it tends to spread quickly and the symptoms are not specific to the cancer.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at age 56, singer D’Angelo at age 51, and actors Michael Landon and Patrick Swayze at 54 and 57, respectively. “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek died of pancreatic cancer at 80, about 18 months after his diagnosis.