“My wife, Mary,
and I have been
married for 47 years
and not once
have we had an
argument serious
enough to consider
divorce. Murder, yes.
But divorce, never.”
Dr. Max Lippman, a stomach
specialist, for consultation,” she
wrote, “and he had discovered
the reason for Jack’s severe
discomfort—cancer of the pancreas.
They call that a ‘silent cancer’
because it’s almost impossible to
detect—until it’s too late.”
CR | Page No. 46 | Winter 2009
to film his 22nd movie, The
Sunshine Boys, co-starring Walter
Matthau. He was also still traveling
the country doing comedy. “My
wife, Mary, and I have been married
for 47 years and not once have we
had an argument serious enough to
consider divorce,” one joke began.
“Murder, yes. But divorce, never.”
Benny was a notorious hypochondriac, so when he complained
of stomach pains while on tour in
Portland, Ore., in July 1974, few
people took him seriously. He
returned home in late July to see
his doctor, but rounds of tests
found nothing wrong. In October,
while he was rehearsing for a show
in Dallas, the pains returned. Benny
flew home and was hospitalized. But
doctors still couldn’t find a cause.
By the end of October, it became
clear that Benny wasn’t going to
be well enough to perform in The
Sunshine Boys. His doctors were
prescribing increasing amounts
of sedatives and confining him to
bed. In her biography, Benny’s wife
recalled how the couple finally
learned the cause of his pain.
“Jack’s physicians had called in
A CHALLENGING CANCER
Nearly 35 years later, an effective
screening test for pancreatic
cancer is still lacking and the
disease remains one of the
hardest cancers to detect early,
says Robert Mayer, a medical
oncologist at the Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute, in Boston. The
pancreas, a yellowish organ about
seven inches long, lies behind the
stomach and small intestine and
secretes digestive enzymes along
with hormones like insulin that
regulate blood sugar. An elongated
organ, it has a wide head-like
end, and a thinner tail-like end.
Pancreatic cancer patients “tend
to present with very nonspecific
symptoms: abdominal pain, loss of
appetite, weight loss,” says Mayer.
“By the time the diagnosis is made,
the cancer is often very advanced.”
Due in large part to these late-stage diagnoses, survival rates
for pancreatic cancer are among
the lowest for any type of cancer.
The National Cancer Institute
(NCI) estimates that in the U.S.,
nearly 38,000 people were newly
diagnosed in 2008 and more than
34,000 men and women died of
the disease. About 5 percent of
patients survive for five years after
diagnosis. (For more information,
see the sidebar on page 45.)
When Benny’s cancer was diagnosed, Mayer adds, “they didn’t
even have the scanning technology—
like MRIs and CT—that we have now,
so it would have been even more
difficult to make an early diagnosis.”
In some ways, Benny was a
typical patient: Nearly 90 percent
of pancreatic cancer patients are
over 55, and the risk of developing
the disease rises sharply with age.
For most of his life, Benny was also
a smoker, a risk factor that doubles
or triples a person’s chances of
developing the cancer. “But we
really don’t know what causes it,”
says Mayer.
There may be some genetic
links to pancreatic cancer. “We’ve
learned that people with a
mutation in the BRCA2 gene—a
mutation usually linked to breast
cancer—may also have, or appear
also to have, a significantly higher
risk,” he says. “There are also
cases like the Carters. Jimmy
Carter lost four or five family
members to the disease, and there
are other such families that hint at
some kind of genetic susceptibility.
It’s possible, especially given that
the [mutated BRCA2] gene occurs
more frequently in Ashkenazi
Jews, and his mother died young
of such an aggressive [breast]
cancer, that Jack Benny was
carrying this gene.”
Today, says Mayer, surgery to
remove the tumor is an option
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