Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse Shares Devastating Health Update

Ben Sasse, the U.S. Senator who represented the state of Nebraska from Jan. 3, 2015 to Jan. 8, 2023 has issued a statement about his health. The senator shared a lengthy post about his health during a Dec. 23, 2025, post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where he explained how he had recently received a shocking diagnosis from his doctors.

The post contained a detailed explanation about his prognosis, as well as some insight into how he's taking things personally.

The father of three also took the opportunity to wax poetic about the meaning of life and how, in the darkest of times, his religion and faith comfort him.

Still, the shocking turn of events isn't being taken lightly by Sasse or his family, according to his post, and he's still going to do everything in his power to overcome the new diagnosis that leaves him, in his own words, "marching to the beat of a faster drummer."

Here's everything we know about the former Senator's health.

Sasse made the grave announcement on X, telling his followers how he had recently been diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer.

Calling the diagnosis a "death sentence," Sasse explained how he had received the diagnosis a week prior to his post, saying that he wanted to get the word out because he believed that people had started to suspect that something was amiss.

Sadly, the former Senator revealed that he's "gonna die" in the post, before sharing a bit about his outlook.

"I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers," he wrote. "As one of them put it, 'Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.' Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all."

Still, even with less time than he would prefer to have left, Sasse says that he's pushing forward with his life and that he doesn't plan on "going down without a fight."

Based on the rest of Sasse's post, it sounds like that will include treatments.

"One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jaw dropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more," he wrote. "Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived."

But, how that will look for his family — which includes a wife and three children — remains to be seen, and one can only imagine how heartbreaking this entire process will be for all of them, even with their devout faith and large support network.

There's a reason that pancreatic cancer is often a death sentence, and that's because people rarely know that they have it until it's too late. Unfortunately, the disease doesn't often cause any symptoms until it has spread to other parts of the body (metastasized), which makes containing and controlling the cancer next to impossible.

However, the Mayo Clinic says that there are some signs that people may experience, which include jaundice, light-colored stools, weight loss, and dark urine.