After 10 months of grueling chemotherapy to kill the cancer cells in his pancreas, Rodney Mayo was concerned. Not so much about a reoccurrence, but the fact that his hands have lost some of their callouses because a lengthy treatment for his disease had eaten into time from his wood- and metal-working hobby.
Not to worry though. His recent purchase of four acres in Loveland will put his handyman skills to the test as he plans to build a new house along with a dream workshop, Herculean tasks his octogenarian dad, Mike, would heartily approve.
“His hands are still rough at 87,” said the 57-year-old Colorado native who grew up in Berthoud with his two brothers. “Mine are not as bad, and they got kind of soft with all that hospital time.”
His “time” in the hospital was to eliminate a cancer that was once equated with a grim outcome for patients like him, as it was typically diagnosed when it was too advanced to treat.
That is changing.
“When I found out I had cancer last December, I thought I’d be dead in a couple of months,” recalled Rodney. “I was in the ER that night, and I Googled it and read that the actor Patrick Swayze died within 90 days of finding out.”
But that was 15 years ago. Rodney’s outcome would be different.
“I had a CT scan a few days ago and my oncologist was so excited … ‘You are cancer-free,’ he said.”
Pancreatic cancer: A silent killer
The pancreas is an incredibly important organ. Shaped like a leaf and about six inches long and two inches wide, it provides vital functions that help us digest food by producing specific gastric juices, along with regulating our blood sugar and making insulin.
The pancreas lies across the bodies, hidden behind the stomach and in front of the spleen. This tricky location has contributed to poor prognoses for pancreatic cancer patients as compared with other types of cancers.
Pancreatic cancer is the nation’s third-leading cancer, behind lung cancer and colon cancer, and it is expected to rise to the No. 2 spot in the coming years. Unfortunately, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is lower when compared to other cancers as well because doctors typically catch pancreatic cancer later, after it has spread to other organs.
For example, while pancreatic cancer comprises 3% of all cancers in the nation, it represents 7% of all deaths. According to the American Cancer Society, in 2024:
- Roughly 66,440 people (34,530 men and 31,910 women) will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
- About 51,750 people (27,270 men and 24,480 women) will die of it.
- In Colorado, about 1,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer are diagnosed annually.
Why are outcomes so dire for pancreatic cancer patients?
Until recently, it was tough to screen for pancreatic cancer, unlike other cancers such as breast cancer, colon cancer and skin cancer, which are more accessible to biopsies and scans. Blame its position in the body, sometimes vague symptoms and the tendency to be caught in a late stage.
The most apparent symptom of pancreatic cancer is jaundice, which is a yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes. This occurs when a tumor in the pancreas blocks the liver’s bile duct, causing a buildup of bilirubin.
But other symptoms can go unnoticed or attributed to other maladies, such as fatigue, stomach or back pain, unexplained weight loss and changes to your stool. They are general enough that people don’t seek immediate care from their primary care physician and put the steps in motion to obtain a proper diagnosis.
‘’It tends to be asymptomatic until later in its course, and stage for stage, it’s just an aggressive cancer and tends to spread easier, and to other organs,” said Rodney’s surgeon, Dr. Richard Schulick, who specializes in complex oncology cases at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.
Schulick is also chair of surgery and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.
It’s not exactly clear what causes pancreatic cancer. However, risk factors include smoking and tobacco use, obesity, extra weight around the waist, chronic diabetes, lack of exercise and possible genetic components. Rodney had none of these factors.
Pancreatic cancer is common in Colorado, but the survival rates at UCHealth are among the best in the nation, especially when detected early.
This helps explain how Rodney beat the odds. Another reason? His cancer team says the disease picked the wrong person: a Gulf War veteran who is a paraplegic, but through tenacity and hard work, he now walks with ankle and foot braces. He is a self-described workaholic who can’t sit still and a Colorado Avalanche fan who is excited to see another season of his favorite team on the ice.
Rodney leaves Colorado behind for globe-trotting Army tours of duty and related jobs around the world
Born in Loveland, Rodney joined the Army in 1985 after high school for the typical reason of wanting to see the world. And that he did. After his first tour of duty in the southwest, he met fellow soldiers who had been stationed in Germany – a place he was keen to visit. During the next three years, he traveled throughout Europe, working at U.S. Army military bases and installing computer data networks.
“I took every advantage I could.”
In 1991, he found himself in southwest Asia during the first days of the Gulf War.
“I’m thinking this is going to be easy duty, and then I end up wearing a gas mask for five straight days,” he said.
But the work was important, as he and his team stayed for three months installing all the wiring and necessary equipment so troops had the infrastructure to communicate with loved ones back in the States.
After six years, Rodney left the Army and returned home to Colorado. A few months later, he went back to Germany as a civilian, working for an Arizona-based contractor for four years. Later, job opportunities took him to Bosnia, Hungary, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Croatia while he was Haliburton’s communication manager in charge of email and satellite systems for all the U.S. bases.
In 2003, he was once again back in Berthoud, working with his dad and brothers as the operation manager of the family oil /gas and construction/fabrication company—a job he held until 2009. But he was bitten by the travel bug again and went to Afghanistan for the next four years, working for a private firm that helped build and maintain U.S. bases for Army troops during the ongoing conflict.
Rodney Mayo participated in a ceremony at Denver’s City and County Building on Nov. 1 to celebrate Hockey Fights Cancer and to highlight better cure rates for pancreatic cancer survivors. Rodney and five other cancer warriors will be part of the starting lineup for the Colorado Avalanche’s Hockey Fights Cancer game on Nov. 9, which is sponsored by UCHealth.
“I was never afraid. The joke was you had just as much a chance to die on I-25 heading to Denver. I knew I had three seconds to run for a bunker or drop in place if there were incoming bombs. And I was lucky. I was never in direct combat.”
Along the way, he married a woman from Hungary and the couple had a son who went to school in Hungary while his dad worked in Afghanistan. Rodney would work 90 days straight and then have three weeks off to travel with his family.
Rodney returned to Colorado in 2013 and worked as a construction manager on oil and gas pipelines. A year later, he was on a camping trip in Wyoming, celebrating July 4th with his then 11-year-old son. That’s when things went horribly wrong. He crashed the four-wheeler he was driving and had to be evacuated by air to Casper for spinal surgery. His injuries included a broken back and a badly damaged spinal cord.
He was paralyzed from the waist down and classified as a T12 paraplegic.
Rodney spent two months in a Denver rehab hospital, where he learned to walk with the assistance of ankle orthotic carbon braces.
“I thought my life was over, but I was determined to walk. I went from a wheelchair to a walker, to crutches, to throwing the crutches away and walking with braces within months.”
He had settled into a life, not traveling as much, but separated from his wife and happy to woodwork and tinker in his shop when he wasn’t working for a bioenergy construction company in Greeley. But last winter, he had a feeling something just wasn’t right.
“I was listening to my body. I have been through so many medical things that I knew something was wrong. Something in my body was causing me to get sick. I went to urgent care a few times, and I knew there was something going on.”
Rodney never had jaundice but felt “off.” In the first few days of December, what he thought was a stomach bug and the flu landed him at the UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies ER in Loveland, where experts did a CT scan.
“I asked the nurse what was going on, and she said, ‘You have a tumor on your pancreas.’”
I thought to myself, ‘This is a death sentence.’”
Early detection means Rodney had good odds against a vicious cancer
Within a few days, Rodney had the good fortune to be meeting with Schulick.
UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital is nationally known for treating pancreatic and other cancers thanks to Schulick and the team he has recruited to come to Colorado.
When a CT scan shows a mass on the pancreas like Rodney’s, doctors do an endoscopic ultrasound to collect tissue samples for a biopsy. That’s when the medical experts confirmed the bad news: Rodney had pancreatic cancer. Almost immediately, he began chemotherapy, starting just a few days after Christmas last year.
Rodney had stage 2 cancer, but Schulick prefers to talk about it as either operable or inoperable.
“Those are the two huge buckets,” he said. “The key is: Can we cut it out or not cut it out?”
Rodney had the good fortune to have operable pancreatic cancer for several reasons:
- His cancer was on the tail of the pancreas, where tumors are typically slower to grow and much easier to remove than if they are at the head of the organ.
- It had been caught early enough that it had not spread to other organs, allowing for a promising outcome.
But before surgery, he would undergo a tough chemo regime. Chemo before as well as after pancreatic cancer surgery is typically recommended by the UCHealth oncology team. Instead of waiting until a few months after surgery to begin these treatments, patients like Rodney get chemo immediately. The hope is that this cancer-fighting regimen will find and kill any microscopic cancer cells that might break away from the tumor and invade healthy blood cells, possibly showing up as cancer months or years later.
“We think this is really moving the needle on pancreatic cancer,” said Dr. Douglas Kemme, who was Rodney’s oncologist at UCHealth Cancer Care and Hematology Clinic in Loveland, where he received chemo treatments. “You want to shrink the tumor and give the surgeons the highest chance of obtaining negative margins.”
Rodney underwent four sessions of a chemo regimen called Folfirinox, a potent combination of several chemotherapy drugs, every two weeks through early March. It’s a taxing drug on patients, causing harsh side effects of fatigue and nausea for Rodney throughout the winter and spring.
After a short recovery, he returned to UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital in March for a procedure called a pancreatectomy. Schulick removed a third of Rodney’s pancreas, specifically the tail end containing the tumor, as well as his entire spleen and 34 surrounding lymph nodes. Tests showed that only two of the lymph nodes that had been attached to the tumor had cancer cells, a big relief to all.
While he recuperated in the hospital, Rodney was impressed by Schulick’s daily visits, when even in the early morning hours, he was wearing a suit and tie: “He was so great and so professional,” he said.
Rodney rested for a few months and then underwent another eight sessions of Folfirinox every three weeks over the summer and early fall, finishing up in October. He credits his care team with saving his life and was grateful he could undergo the chemo treatments closer to home in Loveland.
UCHealth oncologists stress the importance of primary care physicians, often the first point of contact for patients, paying attention to the obvious and not-so-subtle pancreas cancer clues. They credit Rodney for paying attention to the clues his body was giving him, as well as the care he received before he started treatment.
And finally, they are optimistic about pancreatic cancer survivor rates in the coming years, especially with technology assisting with early diagnosis.
“If you took all the people with pancreatic cancer when I was training 25 years ago, about 3 or 4 percent survived. Today, it’s at 13 percent,” Schulick said. “If we can get to the operating room, take out the cancer and get patients the additional, appropriate chemotherapy before and after, we can get that number up to 40 percent.
“Pancreatic cancer is taking too many lives, but the next 10 to 20 years are going to be very different as we learn more about cancer and detection. We’re going to gain a lot of ground, but we need government and public support.”
You can survive pancreatic cancer: Rodney is back in his workshop and building a dream house, too
So far, there’s no sign of a recurrence of Rodney’s pancreatic cancer. But he’s accustomed to battles against bad luck, this latest bout being his most recent.
After 10 years of living with the effects of his devastating spinal injury, he is no stranger to hospitals. He had endured scores of ups and downs, setbacks and victories, procedures and operations. That includes spinal surgeries and a rebuilding of his back during which new screws and rods were put in to reinforce his spine.
“I have some feeling in my legs, and I’m so lucky to be able to walk.”
Rodney’s ongoing fight is against terrible nerve pain he feels 24-7 because of his injury. His struggle has eased, though, as he has been working with the UCHealth Pain Management Clinic in Fort Collins. There, he gets a pump in his abdomen refilled every three months with medication to help him withstand the pain, which, unfortunately, intensified during chemotherapy.
“I’ve been told I’m a tough guy. I just keep my head up,” said Rodney, who lives by himself with his dog Bruno.
It’s hard for him to sit still, even when he was so tired he couldn’t get off the couch during chemo. He dreamed of what a new house and workshop would look like on the four acres of property he bought in Loveland, and he plans to start on it now that he is finally starting to feel better. He’s designed everything from the ground up and plans to build even the staircases and a new dining room table.
“I’m just a busy bee.”
Those on Rodney’s care team attest to his positive attitude and fighting spirit.
“Once you spend five or 10 minutes with him, you realize that this is one of the most gracious patients and do-whatever-it-takes type of person,” Schulick said.
Kemme agreed.
“You read his chart and build a mental picture of him because of all these injuries and all these things that have happened to him, and you walk in the room and see that this is a completely different guy: He pushes himself, and you can’t slow him down. His attitude is: ‘I’m living my life.’”
While that life has brought him back to the same area where he grew up decades ago, he comes to it after having covered the globe and 70 of its countries, Colombia being the latest but surely not the last one. Rodney hopes to use his passport again sooner rather than later.
“Traveling just opens your mind to what the world is like outside of Berthoud, Colorado.”
He couldn’t get to Germany for this fall’s Octoberfest to join his 22-year-old son Matyas, who is studying abroad in Torina, Italy, this college semester. Matyas attends the University of Utah on a swim scholarship, and his dad is pleased the two share the same travel itch.
“I think everyone should live life, and I am so glad I got to live the life I have. I think everyone should try and do the same: Live life, as hard as it can be. You must stay positive. I work all the time, but I play hard, too. You gotta work hard to play hard.”