Alex Trebek Provides Health Update One Year After Cancer Diagnosis

Alex Trebek has remained remarkably candid about his struggles with stage 4 pancreatic cancer since he was diagnosed in March of 2019, and on Wednesday, the longtime Jeopardy! host offered fans another update about his health in celebration of surviving one year with the disease.

“If you’ve got a minute, I’d like to bring you up to date on my health situation,” Trebek says in a video posted to the Jeopardy! Twitter account. “The one-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer patients is 18%. I’m very happy to report I have just reached that marker. Now, I’d be lying if I said the journey had been an easy one. There were some good days, but a lot of not-so-good days. I joked with friends that the cancer won’t kill me, the chemo treatments will. There were moments of great pain, days when certain bodily functions no longer functioned, and sudden, massive attacks of great depression that made me wonder if it really was worth fighting on. But I brushed that aside quickly, because that would have been a massive betrayal — a betrayal of my wife and soulmate, Jean, who has given her all to help me survive.”

“It would have been a betrayal of other cancer patients who have looked to me as an inspiration and a cheerleader of sorts, of the value of living and hope, and it certainly would have been a betrayal of my faith in God and the millions of prayers that have been said on my behalf,” the host continued. “You know, my oncologist tried to cheer me up the other day. He said, ‘Alex, even though the two-year survival rate is only 7%,’ he was certain that one year from now, the two of us would be sitting in his office celebrating my second anniversary of survival. And you know something? If I — no, if we because so many of us are involved in this same situation — if we take it just one day at a time, with a positive attitude anything is possible. I’ll keep you posted.”

You can watch Trebek’s complete update in the video below.