Meet Lora and Chris Jenkins of Southern California. They are parents to three children and also have two grandchildren. Lora’s journey with pancreatic cancer began very abruptly in the fall of 2022. Despite feeling in great health, an intuitive voice in her head told her to get checked out one day in October 2022. She visited her local emergency room, where they found a mass on her pancreas. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and it was then that a doctor estimated she had 3-9 months left to live.
With this bleak news and doctors not giving her any hope to hold onto, Lora and her husband Chris felt the lowest they’ve ever felt. However, Lora’s self-advocacy and Chris’s ability to handle the insurance headaches and support Lora through this turned things around for their family. She did not accept the doctors’ negative outlook on her prognosis. Instead, she sought out additional opinions from doctors at other hospitals. Although this was the first time she or anyone in her family had experienced pancreatic cancer, genetic testing did reveal a genetic mutation that likely was the cause of her pancreatic cancer despite her healthy lifestyle.
Lora and her husband share their experiences as a patient and caretaker pair and how they took on Lora’s treatments as a team. They also discuss the alternative medicines they used throughout her journey and the positive effect they had in keeping up her strength and pain tolerance.
Fortunately, a year after her diagnosis, she connected with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and was able to undergo a clinical trial from which she saw significant positive effects. Eventually, after some time on the clinical trial regimen, her condition made her a candidate for surgery. This past January, she underwent the long-anticipated surgery that ultimately saved her, with double clean margins and a very successful surgery outcome.
The couple also share a lot about how they relied heavily on their faith in God during this trying and tumultuous time with pancreatic cancer. Today, Lora is declared no evidence of disease and lives every day to the fullest, knowing that if it weren’t for her clinical trial, she might not have had such a positive outcome in this disease.
Join us for this week’s episode of the Project Purple Podcast to learn about the inspiring story of Lora and Chris’s life after battling pancreatic cancer!
