Ben Sasse Reveals Why His Face Looks Different Amid Cancer Battle

Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse has people doing double takes after a few public appearances, and the reason is tough. The former Nebraska senator said the visible changes to his face come from aggressive cancer treatment.

He was born in Plainview, Nebraska, studied at Harvard, St. John’s College, and Yale, and taught at Yale and the University of Texas at Austin. He served as president of Midland University, then represented Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 2015 to 2023. In 2023, he became the University of Florida’s 13th president. He stepped down in July 2024 to care for his wife amid her health issues.

Ben said the visible changes to his face are tied to treatment for metastatic stage-four pancreatic cancer, not a separate injury. In a February interview, he revealed that the treatment has taken a heavy toll. He said he is part of an aggressive clinical trial at MD Anderson in Houston. He told Church Leaders that he spends several days a week in the hospital, takes strong pain medication like morphine, and sleeps 15 to 16 hours a day.

“It seems to be going pretty great, except my liver and kidneys are having a little trouble keeping up with all the poison from me,” Ben revealed. “I have trouble maintaining skin on my face. So I bleed a lot out of my face, and I puke a lot, like everybody on chemo. But overall very, very blessed with the team that we have and what we’re working through.”

When he announced his diagnosis in December 2025, he said he had metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer and described advanced pancreatic cancer as a “death sentence.”

“Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do,” Ben posted on X (formerly Twitter). “I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. 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.”

As for how long he could have to live, that part is unclear. What Ben has said publicly is that he was “given 90 days to live” in mid-December, but by February, he told the Hoover Institution the clinical trial meant he would live longer than 90 days and that he did not know how many months remained.

“We'll live a lot longer than 90 days, but don't know how many months that is. But whether you have 90 days or 12 months or 12 years or 75 years left to live, we're all gonna be pushing up daisies,” Ben said. “And so it, it seems like trying to figure out what the important things are, what the eternal questions you need to wrestle through what it looks like to see the relationship between sin and death and a broken world.”