UK (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse announced Tuesday he has terminal stage-four pancreatic cancer, prompting outpouring of reactions across political circles.
In a post on X, the former Republican senator disclosed his diagnosis and referred to it as a “death sentence.”
“Friends – This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,”
he wrote.
From 2015 until 2023, Sasse, 53, served as Nebraska’s representative in the US Senate. He was one of seven Republicans who supported Donald Trump’s indictment in 2021 following the Capitol shooting on January 6. The two- thirds maturity needed for conviction was n’t reached by the Senate vote.
Sasse, the son of a football coach and high school teacher from Nebraska, attended Harvard and Oxford before earning a PhD in history from Yale.
Sasse criticized both the left and right extremities of the political spectrum in an outstanding goodbye speech to the Senate before his retirement. Of the left, he said,
“Our history is exclusively a story of victimhood and a narrative of oppression. There can be no redemption, no progress, and no hope.”
On the right, he said:
“Victimization is a story we trumpet. Demagogues denounce the idea that there could be anything left to conserve in America. According to these zealots, we lost the idea of America long ago, and it is naive to think it could be recovered.”
In his statement on Tuesday, Sasse said:
“This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad.” Sasse and his wife have three children.
There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer – but the season of advent isn’t the worst,”
Sasse continued.
“As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.”
According to the American Cancer Society, about 67,000 Americans receive a pancreatic cancer diagnosis each year, and over 51,000 of them die from the disease.
How long is the typical prognosis for metastatic pancreatic cancer?
Sasse served in the Senate from 2015- 2023, known for conservative views but advancing to condemn Trump in his alternate indictment; he abdicated from UF in 2024 citing family health requirements, with pancreatic cancer generally offering under a time survival at stage four.
The five- year relative survival rate hovers around 1- 3 for distant metastases, per foreseer data, though individual issues vary grounded on age, performance status, excrescence labels, and response to curatives; long- term survivors remain exceptionally rare.
Young cases, those with good ECOG status, lower CA19- 9 situations, or intestinal- type histology chow slightly better, but overall, the complaint’s aggressiveness limits most to under a time despite advances in targeted treatments.