“Jeopardy!” Host Alex Trebek’s wife Jean has just announced that the Trebek family has sold its beloved lake house in Central California. Writing on the website Insidewink, Jean Trebek said the house had been a wonderful refuge for her husband and her family for the last twenty years. However over the last year, with the family coming together to battle Alex’s pancreatic cancer, Jean writes that “we realized that our home was becoming more of an obligation than an inspiration, and that is was time for us to sell it.”
For a lot of people who are dealing with cancer, streamlining some financial details is an important task.
Read MoreStaying Positive And Getting Back To Work
Pancreatic cancer is a difficult diagnosis, but Trebek has stayed positive, and done well under treatment, just announcing that he has finished a course of chemotherapy.
"Now, normally, the prognosis for this is not very encouraging. But I'm going to fight this, and I'm going to keep working, " Trebek continued. "And with the love and support of my family and friends, and with the help of your prayers also, I plan to beat the low survival rate statistics for this disease. Truth be told, I have to! Because under the terms of my contract, I have to host jeopardy for three more years! So help me. Keep the faith, and we'll win. We'll get it done. Thank you."
View of Lake Nacimiento from Trebek's home
Usually one of the major steps in figuring out treatment for pancreatic cancer is understanding whether surgery is an option. "So our first step in figuring out how best to treat pancreatic cancer is to decide can the patient have surgery or not,' says Dr. Allyson Ocean, a medical oncologist at Weil Cornell Medicine and New York Presbyterian. "If we feel that the patient is appropriate for surgery, even nowadays we are giving chemotherapy before surgery to shrink the tumor down, to make the surgery easier."
The best option, according to Dr. Ocean, is chemotherapy both before and after surgery, if surgery is possible. "It's also been shown that giving chemotherapy before surgery, followed by surgery, followed by more chemotherapy, gives patients the best chance of a longer term survival," says Dr. Ocean. "So we actually even in patients who can have surgery from the get to, we're usually giving them chemotherapy first, shrinking it down, treating the bloodstream also because there may be microscopic cells in the bloodstream. Then, we proceed with surgery and then chemotherapy after surgery too."
Interior of Alex Trebek's lake front home, which has been put on the market for 1.4 million dollars
Trebek is not the only notable American who's slimmed down his or her real estate portfolio after a cancer diagnosis. NBC's Tom Brokaw, the former "Nightly News" anchor, put his weekend retreat, a 56 acre estate in New York's exclusive Westchester County, on the market while he underwent treatment for multiple myeloma. Brokaw also listed his Montana ranch where he spent much time during the summer.
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