Loving Grandma, 59, Is Rushed To The Hospital With ‘Hallucinations:’ It Turned Out To Be Cancer

However, her symptoms persisted and even got worse until, one night, her daughter, April Flitton, 30, called an ambulance because her mother was experiencing hallucinations.

Once she was at the hospital, doctors quickly diagnosed Sharon with pancreatic cancer. The stage of her disease remains unknown.

"I didn't get (the) news directly from the doctor," April, who's from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England, told EssexLive. "The palliative nurses told me, 'She's got days, if not hours,' and they were right. I never expected that (in a) million years. I thought she had quite a lot of time."

As April said, the doctors were right about Sharon's prognosis. She passed away just one week before her 60th birthday.

Now, April is telling her mom's story to raise awareness and funds for early pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

"Early diagnosis is so important with this cancer," April said. "No one can stop it from happening, but we need to find it early. It's such an aggressive cancer; it is like a silent killer."

"It gets hold of you and that's it, before you know it, you're stage four and you're gone," she added. "Having a simple diagnostic test would mean an awful lot."

Understanding Pancreatic Cancer

Dr. Anirban Maitra, of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, previously told SurvivorNet that because the pancreas is inside the abdomen, "it often doesn't have symptoms that would tell you that something is wrong with your pancreas … by the time individuals walk into the clinic with symptoms like jaundice, weight loss, back pain or diabetes, it's often very late in the stage of the disease."

The American Cancer Society estimates that about 62,210 people will be diagnosed with this type of cancer in 2022, and about 49,830 people will die from it, which is to Maitra's point that "most people will die from this disease within a few months to a year or so from the diagnosis."

"The reason for that is that most individuals, about 80 percent, will actually present with what we called advanced disease (or metastatic), which means that the cancer has either spread beyond the pancreas or into other organs like the liver, and so you cannot take it out with surgeries," he said.

Dr. Allyson Ocean explains why pancreatic cancer is so hard to treat.

Dr. Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center, previously told SurvivorNet that pancreatic cancer is soon to be the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States.

"Mortality is rising because it's caught so late," she said, "and we don't have enough effective medications against the cancer."

So, the question in front of oncologists today is: "How can we detect this disease earlier in the process so we can have a better impact on the survival of our patients?" Maitra said.

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