One morning a few weeks ago, Alex Trebek woke up in agony, struggling to move. He had barely slept during the night, but he dragged himself out of bed and got dressed for work.

A small production crew had set up a studio in his Los Angeles home so he could tape introductions to old episodes of “Jeopardy!,” the quiz show he has hosted for more than three decades.

He hadn’t recorded a new show since the pandemic halted production in March. Normally, Trebek hosts five episodes a day, two days a week, from July to April — so there was new material to air through the first three months of the shutdown. Now that the stockpile had run out, producers decided to resurrect popular episodes from years past.

As he climbed the stairs, he had to stop to rest. Then he got in front of the camera, and something shifted.

“Oddly enough, when we started taping I suddenly started to regain my strength,” he said in a phone interview a couple of days later. “It’s the strangest thing. It is some kind of an elixir.”

For the next hour and a half, Trebek narrated introductions for 20 episodes, including the first game of “Jeopardy!” he hosted, from 1984. He also taped promotional videos and recorded a health update for fans who have been following his struggle with advanced pancreatic cancer.

Trebek, who turns 80 this month, has never been one to ignore hard facts. He plans to keep making the show for as long as he can, but he worries that his performance is declining, that he’s slurring his words and messing up clues. “It’s a quality program, and I think I do a good job hosting it, and when I start slipping, I’ll stop hosting,” he said.

After some encouraging news from doctors last year, Trebek’s prognosis has worsened. If his current course of cancer treatment fails, he plans to stop treatment, he said.

“Yesterday morning my wife came to me and said, ‘How are you feeling?’ And I said, ‘I feel like I want to die.’ It was that bad,” he said. “There comes a time where you have to make a decision as to whether you want to continue with such a low quality of life, or whether you want to just ease yourself into the next level. It doesn’t bother me in the least.”

“It’s a show about right and wrong.”

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Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world for The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal, where she was a reporter for seven years. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. She holds a bachelor’s degree in religion from Columbia University, and received master’s degrees in religion and journalism from Columbia.