A Champion for Pancreatic Cancer and Caregivers
- Bachelor Nation’s first Golden Bachelorette, Joan Vassos, 62, says she is rewriting a “vibrant” new chapter in her golden years with a second chance at love, while still holding space for her husband of 32 years, John Vassos, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2021.
- In an in-depth chat with SurvivorNet, the widow of nearly six years wants others grieving to know that it is possible — and OKAY — to allow yourself, when ready, to find love again.
- Continuing to honor her late husband, the big-hearted mother and grandmother advocates for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN), the leading pancreatic cancer nonprofit. She uses her platform to promote early detection, help raise funds, and support survivors and their families.
In an in-depth chat with SurvivorNet, the mother, grandmother, and widow of nearly six years wants others grieving to know that it is possible — and OKAY — to allow yourself, when ready, to find love again. Freeing herself from the guilt she felt when first embarking on her journey to the “final rose,” now, Joan excitedly awaits another magical holiday season with her fiancé Chock Chapple, with the support of their families, while also keeping John’s spirit very much alive.
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“He said, ‘I know John was a big part of your life in. I don’t expect you to, you know, act like he ever was — I’m fine with you talking about that,'” Joan says. “So Chock gave me that gift. Like, it’s okay to have John as part of your memory.”
Disney Magic, Memories Old and New
Sharing an example, endearing thoughts of John surfaced for Joan while enjoying a trip to Disney World last week with Chock (a family nickname for Charles), who is an insurance executive from Wichita, Kansas. All of their kids met them out, along with Joan’s grandchildren.
“So the show always gives a gift at the end of your season, if you end up as a couple and so they gave us a trip for both of our families. So 15 of us went to Disney World.”
Joan has four kids in their 30s — Allison, Nicholas, Erica, and Luke — along with three grandchildren. Chock has two children, Taylor and Tyler, in their early 20s.
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“It was wonderful and exhausting and, but it’s kind of something I always dreamed of, taking my grandkids to Disney World — I took my kids when they were little. And so it was wonderful to have like a partner to do that with, because Disney World is hard to do by yourself.”
Though it wasn’t John, Joan says she is so thankful she “found love” in the “second part of my life. So it’s been going great.”
Explaining that John is still very much a “part of our lives,” she sees his presence when she’s around her family. as his positive traits continuously light up in their kids.
“I have a few pictures around the house. Again, it’s a little painful me for me to look at them still. So I don’t have a lot, but I do say things all the time, like, ‘Oh, God, John would have loved this’ or ‘John loved it here at Disney World.’ I have the best memories of John and I taking our kids here.”
“Chock is totally fine with that. And he said that right from the beginning.”
A ‘Dream’ Holiday in the Big Apple
Now, after a whirlwind year of traveling and allowing themselves to enjoy life, the pair — who have been together since last year’s Golden Bachelorette finale, which aired in November 2024 — is spending the whole month of December at an Airbnb in New York City, “a dream we’ve both had to live in the city,” she says.
As for how their kids are meshing overall? “They get along great. They’re very happy for Chock and I.”
Understandably, it was an adjustment at first, Joan says, recalling conversations with her kids about going on the show.
“They’re like, ‘Why do you need to do this?’ I said, ‘I’m doing you a favor finding somebody, because you’re not going to have to worry about me and I don’t want you to worry about me.’ So they kind of agreed with that and they’ve been really good about it.”
“So they are happy I have somebody. They encourage me all the time,” she adds.
Regarding her plans in New York City, Joan says she and Chock will visit Christmas markets and attend several Broadway shows, including Aladdin, where she made a one-night appearance as a matchmaking fortune teller last September.
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“They invited us to come back and just see the show, which is going to be fun. So I’m sure we’ll do that. We’ll obviously go see the Christmas tree. We will probably ice skate in Central Park. We’re going to do like the total New Yorker thing,” she says, adding: “We’re going to eat bagels every day and walk around Central Park — and Bryant Park has an amazing [Christmas] market.”
As one of the latest Bachelor royal couples, Joan also listed off a plethora of meet-ups planned with various alum.
“The women from Golden Bachelor and the men from my season, I am friends with all of them. And for the women that came off the Golden Bachelor, we have a huge text chain, with all 22 of us, and it is active. If you don’t look at your phone all day, you will come home and there’ll be 20 messages that you missed.”
And Joan’s not the only social butterfly in the relationship, as Chock “was just in Chicago with two other guys from their season, visiting Pascal,” a runner up from The Golden Bachelorette.
Women In Their 60s Can Still Be Main Characters
Musing over life in more modern times, Joan points out that life has changed quite a bit from how her mother was at her age, and older generations in general.
Feeling “vibrant” while “reveling in her “second half of life,” she says “being in your 60s used to be — it’s time to retire and kind of be in a support role, take care of your grandkids while the next generation comes up. But I don’t feel like it’s like that for our generation now. I feel like we are really more vibrant and working longer and later and, you know, staying young.”
In the dawn of a second chapter, she says women are “not ready to close the book and, you know, kind of climb in the backseat of the car and be in the support role. We [can] still [be] the main people out in the world, being visible, be, you know, strong and contributing and smart.”
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Commendably, in her first foray into reality television, when she joined The Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner, Joan self-eliminated to be with her family. Her daughter, Erica, had just given birth, and she needed her mom. So during week three, Joan gracefully bowed out.
Family First
Chock, during filming on The Golden Bachelorette, tragically learned that his mother had passed. After an endearing moment being comforted by Joan when he shared his news, he temporarily left the show to be there for his family. But thankfully, Chock came back. And the fan favorite wound up getting the final rose.
“I think, you know, with our age people, that’s a risk,” Joan says of the difference between the traditional Bachelor and Bachelorette shows, and her season.
“We have aging parents, we have kids in their childbearing years, who, you know, are raising families, and there’s a chance that something’s going to happen in our life that’s going to [take] away from our fun and games. I think for everyone as a parent, your life is always second. You know, always takes the backseat to your kids.”
The Power of Support
Joan made a point to note how supportive the care was for her and the contestants while filming, as it was such an emotional process for her and some of the others who have experienced loss.
She says she gives “so much credit” to the two doctors that they had on staff. “They are phenomenal.”
“You know, with the younger generation Bachelor or Bachelorette people, they deal with drama,” Joan continues. “With us, older people. We didn’t have that drama, but we also have these pasts and you’re not on this show because life has gone perfectly. You’re on the show because something has happened, you may be divorced, but it also may be — maybe your spouse has passed away. And that obviously was, you know, what happened to me.”
Up until that point, Joan shares that she doesn’t think she had “processed things very well.”
“I was really good at making sure I was there for my kids and making sure that they were happy or that they were dealing with this. And I was showing I was being strong and supportive of them. And I don’t think I processed things very well.”
Navigating feelings of grief after loss or a difficult diagnosis
Joan hadn’t talked about John a lot after his death because the pain was too much. But on the show, she says she was “kind of required to talk about John.”
“It wasn’t very fair to have all these men coming in and, you know, spilling their hearts to me. And for me not to reciprocate and tell my story. So that just brought up like a ton of feelings that I kind of pushed into the back of my mind for two years, really.”
‘I Don’t Think People Accept You Grieving’
The first year after losing John, Joan felt she “just existed.”
“It’s kind of a blur, to be honest. I don’t really remember that year very much. The second year is where the pain really hit, and I started feeling awful. And I feel like I did some grieving them, but at that point, I don’t think people accept you grieving. They were like, okay, you’ve had a year.”
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“And then the third year, right up as like the second year hit, I went on the show. So, so it had been, you know, a good two and almost two and a half years. And I went on the show and then all those feelings that came bubbling up. And then I all of a sudden felt guilty. I felt like I was cheating on John, which is crazy, but, you know, he had told me — and it was probably the best gift he could have ever given me at the end, that he wanted me to find somebody and be happy.”
“And I’m not sure if I would have done it without him have said, you know, he had not said that to me because I would have just felt like I needed to love him forever and not do anything to act like I didn’t love him forever.”
“And I will love him forever. But he wanted me to go and be happy. And, you know, that was a real gift because I wanted that too. And I also didn’t want to be a burden on my kids and I wanted to have a life. And I was starting to feel like, okay, I’m, you know, when I went on the show, I was 61 and it was time to start looking.”
“Thank goodness, I had the guys there — a lot of them had had the same experience. So that was really helpful. And then we had the psychiatrists and and they are they were phenomenal. They were really, really good.”
In fact, one of the psychiatrists gave her “a really good analogy.”
“They said, ‘Pretend you’re holding two balloons and John is one balloon and in one hand, and in the other hand, you have another balloon. You don’t have to let go of the balloon with John and still have another balloon in the other hand.”
“So I didn’t have to let go of him. I didn’t have to say, ‘That’s in my past.’ I could keep that as part of my life. Like, he still was my husband. He was the father to my kids. I did have a whole life with him before I am now starting another life with somebody else. And it’s okay.”
When speaking about future plans with Chock, Joan says, “I’m going to marry him one day,” but for now, they’re “just enjoying life.”
“It’s not like we’re in a hurry. We’re not having kids. We’re not, you know, doing anything major that requires a wedding. My oldest son just got married in the summer. My youngest son is getting married. The son this summer. So I’m going to be kind of busy until at least we get my youngest son married and then maybe I’ll start thinking of a wedding for us. All my kids will be married. And, you know, maybe I’ll start thinking about us at that point.”
Most importantly, Joan says she is surrounded by love. “There is so much love.”
John’s Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis
Pancreatic cancer, according to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN), begins when abnormal cells in the pancreas, a gland deep in the abdomen, grow and divide out of control and form a tumor.
John Vassos was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on Valentine’s Day 2019 and passed away on January 18, 2021. He “fought a hard journey and he did it for almost two years, which is pretty amazing for any pancreatic diagnosis,” Joan shares.
Amid conversations with her kids on how they would honor John’s memory, Joan simultaneously discovered PanCAN when they emailed her directly after hearing about her and John’s story. With the goal of earlier detection and supporting survivors and their families, Joan is now using her platform to educate about the challenging disease.
Learning about pancreatic cancer — why the disease is so hard to treat
“I was like, God, I wish I’d known about you when John was going through this. And I decided that day [they reached out] that I wanted to be partners with them. I love that I can use my voice to increase awareness and to do something to help this cause — that’s exactly what John would have wanted.”
‘It’s Just a Sprain’
Joan launched her PurpleStride team with PanCAN six years to the day after John’s diagnosis.
“So it was on Valentine’s Day last year, and we called our team, ‘It’s Just a Sprain,’ because John had this unwavering optimism and hopeful spirit. And it’s just how he went through life, and he used to say [that] about everything.”
The jovial dad used to coach football, and Joan says if a kid would get hurt he’d say, “Oh, it’s just a sprain, and the kid would jump right back up like everything was fine. So it’s just how he kind of treated life.”
At the last walk she participated in with PanCAN, the leading organization in the world to advocate for pancreatic cancer funding, Joan’s team for John raised $42,000. “So we are going to do it again this year, hopefully, for the walk next year on April 25th.”
Reflecting on her days as a caregiver for John, she calls it an “honor.”
“Being a caregiver is hard. It’s also an honor. You’re helping somebody in the hardest days of their lives and maybe the last days of their lives. So, it’s exhausting, but you give every bit of yourself.”
Sharing some advice for others navigating the role, she says, “Keep a journal, make sure you know when doctor’s appointments are, do the best you can with treatment, but really, you know, rely on other people, give yourself grace to take a break, or to reach out to pancreatic cancer patient services, because they can provide you with so much information.”
Diagnosing this disease earlier is really the key, because then surgery is an option, Joan explains.
“John had symptoms for like four months before he was diagnosed in could have been really important months if we had known what we were looking for,” she recalls. “So, like abdominal bloating and digestive problems. And eventually, he got jaundice, and that’s when, like, the red flag, that’s when caregivers, or that’s when medical personnel started saying, ‘Okay, we might know what’s going on here.'”
“But it took that long until he turned literally yellow before anybody thought pancreatic cancer. So there is no easy way to diagnose this. So, you know, preemptively recognizing these symptoms may give you a better outcome.”
Pancreatic Cancer Symptoms
With pancreatic cancer, most patients do not experience any symptoms until the cancer has metastasized to other organs in the body.
And the symptoms could be attributed to a host of other illnesses, as they include:
- Abdominal pain in the lower back
- Loss of appetite
- Sudden weight loss
- Yellowing of the skin
- Yellowing of the eyes (jaundice)
- Lighter-colored stools
- Darker-colored urine
- Itchy skin
- Recent diabetes diagnosis
- Inability to control diabetes
- Blood clots
- Fatigue
Hope for Pancreatic Cancer
Following Joan’s interview, SurvivorNet spoke with Anna Berkenblit, MD, MMSc, PanCAN’s Chief Scientific and Medical Officer, who explained “two major areas” in the field that could “dramatically improve outcomes for patients.”
Starting with the treatment setting, Dr. Berkenblit explains that when someone is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer today, “it is more often than not advanced, not surgically resectable, and has spread.”
Targeted therapies, she says, have changed the game for other tumor types, but not so much for pancreatic cancer until recently.
“There’s small subsets of pancreatic cancers that have these mutations … and there’s a couple of therapies that help them, but that’s, like, 1% of patients, 2%, 3%. Well, over 90% of pancreatic cancer tumors have mutations in what’s called KRAS. So almost all pancreatic cancers have this KRAS mutation … and it was previously thought to be undruggable, but guess what? People have figured out how to drug it. And we now have these small molecules, so they’re oral, they’re pills, to treat pancreatic cancer.”
Explaining that they are not yet approved, “but the first one to enter a phase III trial, a randomized phase III trial, has completed enrollment now, and we anticipate results from that study next year,” Dr. Berkenblit says. “The FDA Commissioner has a new priority voucher program, and this drug [RMC-6236] was one of the first ones to receive this priority voucher, which is a signal that FDA recognizes a potential value of this drug for pancreatic cancer.”
“The idea is that they’ll work with the companies to, you know, go through the regulatory process in a really collaborative manner, assuming the trial is positive. So we are poised to really have the first drug.”
The problem, however, is by itself, “it’s probably not going to cure patients. And patients do great for a while, tumors shrink. People feel better. They probably will — I hope they will — live longer, but eventually, the tumors figure out how to develop resistance to that drug. And so we’re going to have to use combinations, and there’s a whole variety of different combinations that are already being studied. And so I’m excited about [that], I think the field is going to progress very quickly.”
“So the start is first, it’s being used in what’s called second line metastatic pancreatic cancer, and then this approach is going to be used in combinations in front line metastatic disease, and then, hopefully, in the adjuvant setting. So after someone has had surgery, give this to prevent the cancer from coming back again. That’s the hope.”
Early Detection
“The other area where I’m optimistic is in the space of early detection. So most people [with pancreatic cancer] are diagnosed with cancer when it’s already spread to other organs, or at least is not surgically resectable. and we know that if it can be diagnosed in an earlier stage, outcomes are much better,” Dr. Berkenblit notes.
“And so we have screening strategies for breast cancer, you get your mammogram, colon cancer, you get your colonoscopy, and those things help people live longer. In fact, by 2030, pancratic cancer is going to overtake colon cancer as the second leading cause of cancer death. Why? Because colon cancers were detecting earlier, so fewer people are dying of it, but with pancreatic cancer, we don’t have a screening strategy.”
Part of the problem is that pancreatic cancer not that common. “And so we don’t yet have a good enough strategy to screen everybody, like we do for, you know, people over the age of 40 for colon cancer. We just don’t have that for pancreatic cancer,” Dr. Berkenblit says.
“But we do know that certain people are at higher risk for developing pancreatic cancer, and so PanCAN is really focused on educating people to be aware of symptoms — signs and symptoms you might be developing, and also risk factors that put you at increased risk.”
Some of these risk factors, like obesity, smoking and alcohol use, “are things that you can do things about,” but others, “like family history, genetics, you can’t do anything about age, but if somebody is at higher risk for developing pancreatic cancer, we can help them find a surveillance program. These are usually at larger academic centers, where they follow people more closely because we know that people are more likely to develop pancreatic cancer.”
Dr. Berkenblit also explains that there are a handful of genes that can be passed on from generation to generation that can increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. “And a really good example of that is a BRCA mutation, particularly BRCA2, And you may have heard of that, and you may think about breast cancer, ovarian cancer. People also can develop prostate cancer and pancreatic cancer, but oftentimes people don’t think about that. So really important to be genetic tested.”
“If the patient has a gene that increased the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, then their family members need to be tested, and if the family members have a gene, then they need to be followed closely. Okay? Yes. Also, there’s families where we do genetic testing, nothing comes up, but they have one, two, three, first degree relatives. We just aren’t smart enough yet to know why they are familial clusters, but if you qualify, you should be in a surveillance program, so we can help people get there.”
Seeking to close the book on earlier detection, “we’re doing a lot of work to help figure out what technologies are gonna work, CT scans, blood tests, things like that, to detect cancer earlier.”
Supporting Pancreatic Cancer Patients and Their Caregivers
But if someone with pancreatic cancer is not responding to treatment, “we basically wrap our arms around the patient and their family, their caregivers.”
Dr. Berkenblit says that PanCAN talks to more patients and caregivers and family members than any other organization for pancreatic cancer.
“And I think our caregiver calls actually outnumber our patient calls, often because, and I’m sure, you know, Joan was in this boat, if you have pancreatic cancer, you are overwhelmed, you’re a deer in the headlights, you’re not feeling well, you’re trying to process all the information.”
“So caregivers and family members really step up to advocate for patients, so often they’re the ones who have their wits about them, who can help figure out what clinical trial options would be appropriate — PanCAN strongly recommends that people consider clinical trials every step of the way.”
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PanCAN also helps tackle diet and nutrition, “and provides support all the way through from initial diagnosis to hospice.”
Another area in the comprehensive organization? “Supportive care,” Anna emphasizes. “You know, we can make referrals and things like that. We also meet people where they’re at. Some people call us and they’re like, “I have cancer of the pancreas. What’s a pancreas?”
Or they have PhD scientists coming to them with “12 clinical trials and are overwhelmed with the information and want to figure out which one is the best one.”
When PanCAN engages with patients and caregivers on the phone, they’re assigned a case manager. “That case manager is with them every step of the way, so there’s continuity of care.. And while we don’t provide medical care, we give patients, caregivers and family members information, to empower them, to make the best decisions for themselves.”
‘Don’t Give Up Hope’
Overall, PanCAN has “such a wealth of resources and I like to say, if somebody contacts PanCAN, they’re going to be okay. We’re going to be with them,” Dr. Berkenblit says.
“And we’re constantly trying to figure out how to get the word out about signs and symptoms, about treatment options, and just being there. We partner with a lot of other organizations … and so we certainly can make referrals, you know, if somebody has financial issues, we can help steer them in the right direction, those kinds of things.”
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Most importantly, “Don’t give up hope,” she urges. “I mean, unfortunately, out in the community, there’s still in some areas, this kind of bias or preconceived notion that, oh, you have pancreatic cancer, you know, get your affairs in order. And that’s just not true. We really, we have what’s called the right track model, where we want you to get the right team, the right tests and the right treatment. And, you know, just don’t don’t give up hope and be your best advocate.”
For Dr. Berkenblit, working with PanCAN, and its survivor and caregiver network, has been highly rewarding.
“It’s a privilege. It really is.”
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