It’s been almost 15 years since Lisa Niemi lost husband Patrick Swayze to pancreatic cancer. The dancer recalled the moment she first found out about the Dirty Dancing actor’s heartbreaking diagnosis.
“When he first found out he had pancreatic cancer he turned to me and said, ‘I’m a dead man,’” Lisa, 67, said during an appearance on the “Amy and T.J. Podcast” on Monday, April 8. “I didn’t know much about pancreatic cancer, but he did, and from what he knew, anytime you heard someone had had pancreatic cancer, it was like, ‘Well, he’s out of here.’”
Lisa explained that an endoscopic procedure led doctors to confirm Patrick’s diagnosis. However, since Patrick was “knocked out” after the procedure due to being in “a lot of pain,” the doctors ended up telling Lisa of the prognosis first. When Patrick woke up, doctors informed him of his diagnosis.
“Sure enough, the doctor said you can go ahead and treat it and be as aggressive as you want, but do think about getting your affairs in order sooner rather than later,” Lisa continued.
Lisa and Patrick got married in 1975 after they met when they were teenagers. The Ghost actor opened up about his difficult cancer diagnosis in the months before his death.
“You can bet that I’m going through hell,” he told Barbara Walters in January 2009. “And I’ve only seen the beginning of it.”
At the time of the interview, Lisa and Patrick were spending time at their longtime Los Angeles ranch property.
“There’s a lot of fear here,” the Road House alum said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on. Yeah, I’m scared. Yeah, I’m angry. Yeah, I’m [asking] why me. Yeah, I’m all this stuff.”
Patrick explained that he began to feel sick in 2007 on New Year’s Eve with his wife.
“I tried to have champagne, and it would be like pouring acid, you know, on an open wound.” He continued, “My indigestion issues got gigantic and constant. And then I started thinking, I’m getting skinny. I dropped about 20 pounds in the blink of an eye. And then when you see it in the mirror, when all of a sudden, you pull your eyes down and the bottom of your eyes go yellow and jaundice sets in — then you know something’s wrong.”
Lisa remembered taking a walk at their New Mexico ranch with Patrick and experiencing an emotional moment after his diagnosis. Patrick died on September 14, 2009, at age 57.
“We’re walking along. It’s a beautiful day and he looked at me with tears in his eyes, he said, ‘I want to live,’” the choreographer, who married Albert DePrisco in 2014, candidly shared.
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