I don’t know what pancreatic cancer is like, but I do know what pancreatitis is like, and it’s NOT fun. VERY painful, and it’s a weird pain.
I’ve lost people to pancreatic cancer, too.
Steve Jobs didn’t have the most common, normally quick to kill, kind of pancreatic cancer. He had a different disease, starting in the same ‘pancreatic’ neighborhood. His, rarer type, tends to have the slower course Jobs displayed and that would have been known once they had pathology on it.