The phone call came with the two-word verdict Eric Egelman feared most: pancreatic cancer.

This was August 2023 — and all Egelman could think of were the two other words pounding in his brain: death sentence.

Four years before, his mother had been diagnosed with the disease.

She was dead within six weeks.

So, straight off the phone Egelman sat alone for hours in the bedroom of his Bay Shore home, contemplating how he’d break the news to his son, Matthew, to his brother, Glenn, and to his longtime girlfriend, Susan Sattler.

“I thought about my life insurance and about my will,” he said last week. “I just wanted to be alone to absorb it all.”

Two years later, Egelman, 63, is in remission, one of the ever-growing number of pancreatic cancer patients now defying the odds.

That’s due in

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