Steve Jobs, an American Icon and his battle with pancreatic cancer

Source TMZ

It was  thirty years ago in November that my dad died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 62.  He was diagnosed in May and passed away five months later.  He lived at my home on Banner Mountain and I was with him everyday.  I watched as his once strong frame grew weaker and weaker from that terrible cancer.

Steve Jobs has the same cancer and surprisingly, he has fought off the inevitable for longer than I could imagine.  Pancreatic cancer kills as a percentage, around 95% of those that contract it.  Patrick Swayze fought hard to live but the cancer finally took him at a young age as well.  I hate cancer.  It takes a strong man and makes him a skeleton, especially pancreatic cancer.  You more or less starve to death.  My dad was a 200 pound man who left the earth at 90 pounds.  It is terrible.  I am truly sad for Jobs  because I have watched up close what he is going through.  For some reason these brilliant and talented men contract this disease and it takes them. 

My dad was also a very intelligent man.  He was in college when WW2 started and he enlisted within a week of Pearl Harbor.  He spent the war in different places, mostly in the Pacific on carriers and survived kamikazes and other situations we only read in books.  He was a builder of things.  Houses, commercial buildings, and cabinets.  He could fix anything.  Jobs picture shows he is having the same issues as my dad had with weight.  He is gaunt and thin and frail looking.  For the man who started out in a garage with a idea for a computer we could all use at home, to creating a company valued at the most dollars of any company on the planet, is a testament to Jobs and the American capitalist way of life.

Jobs was free to experimenter and with Steve Wozniak they changed the world.  I hate to see Steve Jobs suffering and I know he is suffering.  The world is a better place because he has lived. God Bless him.