Ben Sasse, former GOP senator, reveals terminal cancer diagnosis

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FILE - Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) questions U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, March 22, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by W

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Former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, a conservative who represented Nebraska for eight years before resigning to serve as president of the University of Florida, has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Sasse, 53, said on social media that the cancer has metastasized and he is "gonna die," but also added that he’s "not going down without a fight."

Ben Sasse’s life and career

The backstory:

Sasse served in the Senate from 2015 to 2023, and stood out as a critic of President Donald Trump’s moral values and policies. He often accused the president of siding with adversarial foreign leaders. 

Sasse was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict the former president of inciting an insurrection after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. After threats of a public censure back home, he extended his critique to party loyalists who blindly worship one man and rejected him for his refusal to bend the knee.

He resigned from the Senate in 2023 to be president of the University of Florida, but he left the university in 2024 after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.

What they're saying:

"This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase," Sasse wrote on social media this week. "Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die."

Sasse, who has degrees from Harvard, St. John’s College and Yale, worked as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. He served as president of Midland University, a small Christian university in eastern Nebraska, before he ran for the Senate.

Sasse and his wife have three children.

"I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more," Sasse wrote. "Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived."

Pancreatic cancer symptoms

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. It’s notoriously aggressive and difficult to treat. Most patients are not diagnosed until the disease has already spread to other organs, largely because there aren't reliable screening tests and early symptoms can be vague or absent, Fox News Digital reports. 

Symptoms can include: 

• Abdominal pain that spreads to the sides or back, loss of appetite and unexplained weight loss, according to Mayo Clinic.
• Jaundice — yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes — along with light-colored or floating stools, dark urine and itching. 
• A new diagnosis of diabetes (or diabetes that becomes harder to control)
• Pain and swelling in an arm or leg that may be linked to a blood clot
• Persistent tiredness or weakness