Patrick Swayze's Last Dance All Too Soon?

Word began percolating this afternoon that Patrick Swayze, the star of movies like Dirty Dancing and Ghost, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Some of the more excitable sites claimed that he had but weeks to live. The truth is bad enough.

Swayze’s rep issued a statement Wednesday after the report began circulating, claiming the star is continuing his normal work schedule, and Swayze’s doctor said the reports of Swayze's imminent death are unfounded.

“Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment thus far. All of the reports stating the timeframe of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue. We are considerably more optimistic,” Swayze’s physician Dr. George A. Fisher said in a statement. Fisher is an associate professor teaching at Stanford University Cancer Center and is involved in many experimental cancer treatments.

Caught in its advanced stages, pancreatic cancer, which strikes about 30,000 people a year, has a less-than 5 percent survival rate for five years. If caught early and treated aggressively with surgery and chemotherapy — and, if the cancer has not spread to lymph nodes — the five-year survival rate can go as high as 17 to 25 percent, said Dr. Avram Cooperman, surgical director for the Pancreas and Biliary Center at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.

In any event, this is a very serious illness and my thoughts go out to the Swayze family. Swayze is one of those actors we grew up watching, and among his earliest breakout roles were in the movies Red Dawn and The Outsiders.