A ‘Star Trek’ Actress Was Given a 4 Percent Chance of Survival. That Was 22 Years Ago.

The list is hers, and she gives it in one breath. In 2004, after a Whipple operation at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, Kitty Swink came out of the hospital, she has said, “with half of my stomach, half of my pancreas, my gallbladder gone, two feet of my intestines removed out, 28 lymph nodes removed, and a 4-percent chance of surviving five years.” She was 49, an actress television audiences knew from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and for weeks she had put the back pain, the weight loss and the heartburn down to stress. Her answer to the number, as she remembers it, was less a plan than a refusal: “I’m going to live. I don’t know why I thought I was going to live, but I thought, ‘I have things to do.’”

Twenty-two years later she is still here, and still working; last fall she and her husband, the actor Armin Shimerman, were on stage together in Los Angeles. The things she had to do turned into a team. With Shimerman and their old friend Jonathan Frakes, who lost his younger brother to the same disease, she helps lead Team Trek Against Pancreatic Cancer, a group of Star Trek actors and their friends who walk every spring for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. It is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, and PanCAN, which described her this spring as “the inspiring Kitty Swink, a 22-year pancreatic cancer survivor,” is asking the country to wear purple.

The diagnosis: Back pain, heartburn, then a weekend that turned her yellow

“I was having symptoms but I didn’t know they were symptoms of pancreatic cancer,” she wrote for PanCAN in 2021. “Lower back pain, weight loss, chronic heartburn.” She had been through cancer once already, a very early-stage breast cancer at 39, and in her telling she was busier worrying about someone else than about herself. A friend told her to stop and worry about herself; Armin told her, “Maybe you should listen to her.” Her doctor first suspected stress-related acid reflux and ran tests. “By Saturday night my urine was brown,” she wrote. “By the time I was seen, I had turned yellow with jaundice.” She was sent to Cedars-Sinai.

The operation she had is the most common surgery for tumors in the pancreas. In a standard Whipple procedure, or pancreaticoduodenectomy, the surgeon removes the head of the pancreas, the gallbladder and the duodenum, the first stretch of the small intestine, along with a portion of the stomach and the surrounding lymph nodes, according to PanCAN. It is a digestive operation as much as a cancer one. The pancreas makes the enzymes the gut uses to break food down (our look at what digestive enzymes actually do explains the chemistry), and PanCAN notes that many patients take pancreatic enzymes afterward to help digest food properly, and that digestion can take time to recover. Swink left Cedars 17 days later. Three weeks after that, she started chemotherapy.

Her oncologist had one instruction for Armin: “Don’t go online and look up the survival rate for pancreatic cancer.”

The odds: Four percent then. Thirteen now.

The number the oncologist did not want Armin to find is close to the one Swink remembers. Jonathan Frakes, talking to KTLA this month, put it the same way: “When Kitty was diagnosed, it was four or five, and now it’s 13.” When PanCAN set itself the goal of doubling five-year survival in 2011, the rate was 6 percent. The American Cancer Society’s 2026 report puts five-year relative survival at 13 percent, the third year running at that figure and still the lowest of any major cancer. (Relative survival compares people who have the cancer with people in the overall population.) PanCAN’s stated goal now is 20 percent by 2030.

Swink has spent much of the two decades since telling other patients about the number she was given and the years she has had since. “I am here to offer hope,” she wrote in 2021. “Hope that it is possible to survive beyond this disease.”

The team: Her Star Trek family turned loss into action

Frakes has known her since the 1970s, when they were young actors in New York. In 1997 his younger brother, Daniel, died of pancreatic cancer at 41, about a week before his 42nd birthday. “His doctor gave him six to eight months to live, saying there was nothing that could be done for him,” Frakes said in 2022. “He died a week before my daughter was born.” Years later Swink became something else to the family. She “represented hope to me,” Frakes told The Mary Sue, and his mother came to count her as a friend, because Kitty was what had not happened for Daniel.

The team came out of PanCAN. In Swink’s telling, her niece began walking PurpleStride, the network’s annual walk, in her name; a friend brought her into PanCAN’s Orange County affiliate; and the founder, Pam Acosta Marquardt, asked her to help. She and Armin formed Trek Against Pancreatic Cancer with Frakes. “I’ve never felt more connected or proud to be part of a charity, if you will,” Frakes said. The team, led last year by Swink, John Billingsley and Juan Carlos Coto, was a Top 10 team at PurpleStride Los Angeles in April for the sixth year in a row, PanCAN said, and KTLA reported this month that Team Trek has raised $750,000 and is on its way to a million. The next Los Angeles walk is April 24, 2027, at the Santa Monica Pier.

The month: What the purple is for

PanCAN has been at this since 1999. The walks pay for three things, according to the organization: its Patient Services program, research into earlier detection and better treatments, and advocacy for federal research funding. Patient Services is a free line staffed by case managers who help with clinical-trial searches and support resources, at (877) 272-6226. Swink became an ambassador for PanCAN’s Talk. Test. Take Control. campaign and gave herself a title of her own: “the West Coast distributor of hope.”

November is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, and PanCAN’s line for it is the one pinned to its own grid: “All together, we can change the story of pancreatic cancer.” World Pancreatic Cancer Day, organized by the World Pancreatic Cancer Coalition, is Thursday, November 19, when the coalition asks people everywhere to turn their world purple.

Swink put the whole of it into two sentences on the PurpleStride stage in 2022. “So, I am here to offer hope that it is possible to survive the disease.” And: “Team Trek’s goal was to raise money and awareness so that more people could survive.” Our story of Danni Duncan, who ran the New York City Marathon a year after bowel cancer, is the companion piece to this one.

Where this comes from: Sources

Kitty Swink’s account of her diagnosis, surgery and treatment is from her 2021 piece for PanCAN, her 2022 PurpleStride Los Angeles speech as published by PanCAN, and SurvivorNet’s May 2024 report drawing on her interview with PEOPLE; her age at diagnosis is from the Project Purple podcast. Jonathan Frakes’s words are from PanCAN’s 2022 release, The Mary Sue (April 1, 2021) and KTLA (November 4, 2026). Team Trek’s results are from PanCAN’s PurpleStride 2026 recap and 2025 release. Survival figures are from PanCAN’s releases of January 2020, January 2023 and January 2026, which report the American Cancer Society’s annual statistics; the Whipple description is PanCAN’s. The posts embedded above are the accounts’ own. Gut Health Times featured Kitty Swink, Jonathan Frakes, Armin Shimerman and PanCAN in an Instagram post on November 9, 2026, and has no commercial relationship with any of them. The illustration is our own. This article describes what the cited sources say and is educational, not medical advice.