Jim Pias

While Jim’s original oncologist did not consider him a candidate for surgery, Jim’s son, who worked in medical sales, managed to get his father’s scans in front of a pancreatic surgeon. After reviewing Jim’s case and presenting it to a tumor board, the surgeon reached back out to Jim with a simple text message.

“I’m your man,” it said.

A few days later, the two met in person, and in November 2023, Jim underwent a pancreatectomy and splenectomy – a procedure he describes as a “modified Whipple.” The surgeon removed Jim’s tumor along with the tail of his pancreas, his spleen and numerous lymph nodes.

Surgery revealed that Jim’s cancer was confined to the pancreas and surrounding tissue, leading doctors to change Jim’s initial Stage 4 diagnosis to Stage 3. The part of Jim’s pancreas that remained after the procedure also remained functional, leaving him without diabetes and not dependent on insulin.

“If you can be lucky with pancreatic cancer, I was lucky,” Jim said.

About four months post-surgery, Jim was back on the golf course, but his good fortune proved short-lived.

Routine follow-up scans detected a cancer recurrence involving Jim’s lymph nodes and lungs. He never experienced symptoms, so the recurrence would likely have gone unnoticed, had he not continued regular checkups.

Doctors treated the recurrence with targeted radiation and NanoKnife therapy, which was successful in eliminating every area they treated. However, when later scans revealed four new lesions – one in a rib, one in his hip and two in lymph nodes – Jim started FOLFIRI again and continued it from April through August of 2025.

“At that point, I was relatively positive the chemo in my immune system would kill off the cancer, so I asked for a PET scan, which I’d never done in the past,” Jim said.

Jim’s understanding was that inactive cancer would not “light up” on a PET scan, and when his new oncologist reviewed the results, he threw up his hands in disbelief.

Nothing lit up.

Jim also believes more people facing cancer should have access to clinical trials and participated in an extensive virtual research interview with roughly 200 physicians and researchers, answering questions about his own experience enrolling in a clinical trial and sharing ideas for making those opportunities easier for people to find and understand. The idea was to give medical professionals who often spend most of their time in a lab a patient’s perspective. Jim hopes the medical community continues improving the way it connects people with cancer with clinical trials, particularly by helping match them with studies based on their individual disease characteristics and genetic mutations.

Jim also hopes to see an increased focus on studying people who continue living years beyond their initial prognoses. Understanding why some patients respond so well, he believes, could help improve treatment options and outcomes for everyone with pancreatic cancer.

Today, Jim returns for scans every three months.

“It’s kind of unnerving having to live three months at a time,” Jim said. “Whenever I think about buying something or doing something long-term, I have to stop and think…am I going to be able to do that?”

Now, four years after his own late-stage diagnosis, Jim still hesitates to make long-term plans. Yet by encouraging people with pancreatic cancer to ask questions, seek second opinions and understand their options, he hopes more of them will have the chance to make theirs.