"Ronnie Wood rejected chemotherapy for lung cancer: 'This hair wasn’t going anywhere' "
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...rolling-stones
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"Ronnie Wood rejected chemotherapy for lung cancer: 'This hair wasn’t going anywhere' "
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...rolling-stones
Bummer, but cigarettes will kill you sooner or later.
Read the article. It never reached his lymph nodes. He got it cut out and it appears to have eliminated it. All the sex, drugs, and rock and roll has made their bodies toxic to everything, including cancer.Quote:
Originally Posted by liv2ski
Something has to.Quote:
Originally Posted by liv2ski
My Grandma smoked cigs for around 60 years, she died in her sleep at 75.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DJSapp
I don't know. Maybe for now, but lung cancer is a quick death sentence. We'll see in a year.
Looks like Ronnie should do a few Just For Men commercials.
WESTON, CT—Since her first day on the job in October 1976, Keith Richards' housekeeper Rosemary Velasquez, 64, has mentally and emotionally prepared herself every single day to find the hard-living Rolling Stones guitarist lying dead somewhere in his home.
"Each morning before I leave for work, I look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and think to myself, 'Rosemary, you could very well find Keith Richards' dead body today," Velasquez told reporters Thursday, adding that from the moment she was first hired by a "nearly comatose" Richards, she began steeling herself for the inevitable discovery of the guitarist's wiry corpse in his bedroom or kitchen. "It's never been a question of if I would find him dead, but where and how soon."
Velasquez said her workday begins as she pulls into Richards' driveway and braces herself for the potential sight of his stark-naked cadaver sprawled out on his front lawn. From there, after gathering her supplies, she takes a quick peek into the backyard, where she fears she will find Richards floating lifelessly face down in his swimming pool.
The housekeeper said that as she goes about her work, she takes a moment to collect herself before opening every door and pulling back each shower curtain. If a door is locked, she noted, she leaves it be and prays it's not locked the next day.
According to Velasquez, anytime she smells an odor other than alcohol or stale cigarette smoke, she immediately imagines a scenario in which the odor gets stronger and stronger, leading her to a closet with a week-old dead body inside.
"In the late '70s, especially, there were a few close calls where I would find little droplets of Mr. Richards' blood leading to his bedroom, and I would tell myself, 'Today is the day,'" Velasquez said. "He'd usually be lying there with a needle sticking out of his arm, but somehow he would always still be breathing. So I would call an ambulance."
"I've had to call 911 at least 30 times since I started working here," she added. "I have to admit, over the years there's been a lot more gunplay around this place than I'd care for."
Besides resigning herself to one day discovering Richards' corpse, the housekeeper of 36 years said she has also remained alert to the possibility of stumbling across the dead bodies of his bandmates and friends. She confirmed there have been several mornings on which she's found a heap of naked bodies in the living room, all belonging to people who were unconscious but not dead.
In addition, during the mid-'80s Velasquez reportedly had to check for Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts' heartbeat so many times she memorized every place on the human body where it is possible to check for a pulse.
"It's a lot of anxiety to go through on a daily basis," she said, mentioning times when she was certain shouting matches between Richards and former girlfriend Anita Pallenberg would lead to the housekeeper finding either Richards, Pallenberg, or both murdered or dead as a result of some bizarre suicide pact. "When I leave each evening, I worry that Mr. Richards will forget he turned the oven on, or that he'll drink too much, or that he'll have a relapse, or that his heart will just stop."
Added Velasquez, "There are just so many ways for this man to die."
Even though Richards is no longer the heavy drug user he once was, Velasquez said the likelihood of finding him dead today is probably about the same as it was in the 1970s.
"Mr. Richards is old enough now he could die from natural causes, which is a possibility I never would have imagined 30 years ago," the housekeeper said. "Personally, I kind of wish he would just die already, because his lifestyle has certainly taken its toll on my health."
At the end of her interview, Velasquez paused a while to gather herself, saying, "Well, it's time for me to go to work."
Fucker is breaking all the rules. Life fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse.
But if you try sometimes
Depending on the size of the tumor and whether or not it grew into anything the 5 year survival could be anywhere from 15% to 50%. Chemotherapy and radiation might be recommended for higher stages, but not a lot of benefit. Not enough information in the article to know what his chances are or whether chemo or radiation was recommended to him. The fact that the operation took 5 hours suggests the tumor might have been fairly advanced even if it hadn't spread to the nodes. That's a long time for a straightforward lung cancer operation--unless the time was measured from the time he was brought to the operating room until he was returned to recovery. The anesthesiologists can dick around for a long time before the surgeon can cut. So basically--he could be dead in a year or he could be playing stadiums into his 90's, if there's anyone left to listen.Quote:
Originally Posted by DJSapp
You'll get what you need.
I kinda like how the Ronnie's twitter feed says the doctor made a "shocking" discovery. Yeah like he's still alive.
I thought that it was hilarious. But a lot of people believe that we need to be thinking about what kind of world we're going to leave for Keef.Quote:
Originally Posted by flowing alpy
Yeah, him and the cockroaches.
The housekeeper piece was from The Onion if anyone was wondering.
Not true. I actually new someone who had some of her lung removed at an old age, and did just fine. Depending on what the sample shows, they often don't do chemo. She also wasn't a smoker, so that was weird.Quote:
Originally Posted by Benny Profane
But yeah, don't be such an ignorant asshole.
Not a doc but I review a lot of records from a highly respected medical facility in the midwest. Maybe he's being sincere about not wanting to lose his hair or maybe the situation has progressed to the point that any chemo/radiation would be palliative, or in other words not a cure but something to slow the disease process and maybe give him a bit more time. It's unusual for someone with a potentially terminal illness to turn down a possible cure based on something like the possibility of losing their hair, but who knows?
Maybe he plans to donate his hair to the RRHOF.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stuckathuntermtn
I've pretty much known this for years, but, brushed up when I got a call a few years ago that started "Greg", (my best friend in college and long time confidant over the phone) "has lung cancer."
I smoked for seventeen years, seriously, and it was one of many very good reasons to quit. I stopped in 1986.
So, fuck you, asshole. I consider myself far from fucking ignorant.
Here, direct from the American Cancer Society:
"The lung cancer five-year survival rate (17.7 percent) is lower than many other leading cancer sites, such as the colon (64.4 percent), breast (89.7 percent) and prostate (98.9 percent).3
The five-year survival rate for lung cancer is 55 percent for cases detected when the disease is still localized (within the lungs). However, only 16 percent of lung cancer cases are diagnosed at an early stage. For distant tumors (spread to other organs) the five-year survival rate is only 4 percent.3
More than half of people with lung cancer die within one year of being diagnosed."
Maybe the doctors mined a Porsche like payment out of your older acquaintance by convincing her to go under the knife when, maybe, she really didn't need it (oh, yeah, trust me, happens every day. Porsches are expensive.), but, usually, and you can put your money on black on that wheel, lung cancer is God's way of telling you to find a nice hospice. Which, after watching three people die of cancer in my life, should be on everyone's radar in late life. She didn't smoke? Sheeeit, she was maybe surrounded by smokers all her life, breathing that shit, along with car and industrial exhaust, of course. Thank the Chinese for taking our air pollution along with our factory jobs, or, this would be a much worse problem. And, thank the many politicians who refused Big Tabacco bribes to make laws that make it almost impossible to smoke comfortably these days. The fucking opioid epidemic of the early twentieth century, and, maybe worse, because nothing is as addictive as nicotine.
End rant. Ignorant, my fucking ass, motherfucker.
Yeah no. This woman was in her 70s and never smoked and with Medicare and Medicaid, I doubt they "bilked" a new Porsche out of her. Maybe the government? And she lived into her 80s.
What. Do you live under the assumption that Medicare is free? Now, who's being ignorant here?
Are you sure she had cancer? There are number of conditions where resection/excision of the lung would be considered appropriate.Quote:
Originally Posted by stuckathuntermtn
Yeah, fwiw I would have said know-it-all ranting old fuck.Quote:
Originally Posted by Benny Profane
I've seen a lot of unnecessary surgery in my career. I've never seen an unnecessary lung cancer operation. (I have seen, and done, plenty of operations that didn't do any good--and quite likely hastened the patients death; unfortunately there's no way to know that ahead of time. We do all we can to find out before lung surgery if the patient has cancer too far advanced for surgery to help--CT scans, MRI's, PET scans, mediastinoscopy--all to find possible spread. We do often operate on people with what's called a solitary pulmonary nodule without a diagnosis of cancer ahead of time if the nodule is suspicious based on patients age, smoking history, and the appearance of the nodule on xray. We do this because biopsies (done with a needle) can miss 15% of cancers. Some of those people will turn out to have benign lesions that need to be removed I've had plenty of long term survivors from lung cancer surgery--and way too many who were to sent to me only to be told the cancer was too advanced for surgery. The staging of lung cancer and the treatment based on the staging is very complex--Quote:
Originally Posted by Benny Profane
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/non-sm...g/staging.html
The treatment is different for every stage.
As far as the cause of lung cancer--the great majority of squamous and large cell cancers are in smokers; adenocarcinomas are frequently seen in non-smokers. It would be reasonable to assume some other environmental cause; what that cause is nobody knows.
That made me shoot beer out my nose.Quote:
Originally Posted by Meadow Skipper
Yeah, well, betcha most of you kids thought that housekeeper story was real.
It was a toomah. I know that for sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by Garth Bimble
Malignancy is not something I recall.
My dad had a chunk of colon removed. Cancerous, but didn't need chemo. It does happen, folks.
I hope none of you fucks ever get cancer--even Benny--but if you do and the doc says chemo, ask her what it's going to do for you, with numbers. Sometimes it does a lot of good (I was skeptical about Jimmy Carter but it seems to have done him a lot of good--guess I haven't been keeping up since the only place I doctor any more is here), sometimes it's because the doc doesn't want to tell you you're going to die and there's nothing that's going to stop it. It's a lot easier to say we can do chemo, even if it does no good.
Has anybody actually proven that Keith Richards is still alive? I mean Otzi looks better. Maybe it's CGI.
With chemo, old data is frequently irrelevant data. OG's comment is a mild example, but Benny's 30 year old sample of one is the most common and dangerous. That's the tl;dr...read on only if you need proof.
I was diagnosed with stomach cancer last fall. 19% survival in the US (historically, as of December). The first MedOnc I saw shrank in his seat and described how toxic and ineffective the drugs were for stomach cancer, told me what sort of extreme options I had and advised my wife and I to consider our family's finances before going too crazy. Never suggested any plan. Luckily, he also made it clear that he had little (no) experience in stomach cancer with patients in their 40's and sent me on to see the experts in Seattle. In the meantime I met with a surgeon who was more upbeat, as well as more experienced and educated.
The UW physicians painted an even more dire picture, though, telling me they could treat it but could not cure it and assigned me a stage 4 (4% survival at 5 years according to historical data [as of December], some of which may actually be as old as Benny). They did advise me to get a PET scan--a fact which made it clear they didn't yet have enough information, despite their willingness to offer conclusions.
Happily, I found a more determined doc in Spokane whose personal vendetta came from losing his mom to stomach cancer at my age, not Porsche payments. He never offered me any rosy promises, but he laid out a plan and told me if the PET was clean and stayed that way we would call the surgeon and "cut the crap out." 6 rounds of chemo later that's exactly what happened. With that seventh round of the fight over the surgeon brought the news that I had had a "pathologically complete response." No sign of disease in the stomach tissue they took (which was probably 80%) or in 36 lymph nodes. Bringing this back to the present discussion, he also said "we see this in about 25-30% of cases." And went on to say that the numbers as published by the ACS really don't reflect the present treatments and will need to be updated soon.
Obviously I am a sample of 1 and my survival is not yet completely certain despite the huge uptick in my prospects. But I think it's worth noting that both my treatment regimen and in particular the version of one of the drugs used are new enough that they haven't had an impact on the heavily history-biased stats that are out there.
I think we're doing a lot better than most people realize. Not sure how I feel about Ronnie's decision, though.
Awesome.
Thanks, I'm certainly hoping so!
Sorry for the length/thread jack. I get a little sensitive to old info masquerading as permanent knowledge a la Benny there.
Thanks for the info. I'm glad to hear things are doing well.
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Wow, jono. Glad things are on the upswing.
Red Sox broadcaster and former Red Sox second baseman Jerry Remy has undergone 4 lung cancer surgeries since 2008, it keeps recurring and then they cut it out. His most recent surgery was in mid-June and he was saying he'd be back in the booth right after the all-star break and that hasn't happned so I'm not sure how he's doing this time. But it has been an example of long-term survival with good quality of life so far at least.
Hopefully he's just accepted some follow-up. Lung cancer is particularly interesting in terms of current discoveries. It's the best example for how genetic testing of the cancer tissue itself can offer different options for treatment. Wide variety but they're making progress on improved outcomes by differentiating the types.
I saw him a few months ago in a local bistro he owns. He got up and walked without assistance, but his skin is a bit grey.Quote:
Originally Posted by old goat
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FKNA Jono!
Which brings up the flip side of my advice. Obviously you want to see someone who is up to date on the kind of cancer you have and has all the information. in your case it sounds like there was a regimen that had been reported that the other doctors didn't know about. And the negative PET scan meant no or only microscopic spread to lymph nodes, which is unusual in stomach cancer (depending on what kind of cancer you had). Finally, if one is told there is nothing to be done, it is always reasonable to ask if there is a clinical trial available, and of course ask for a second opinion. It's also reasonable to do your own research--use pubmed--the searchable National Library of Medicine database. I just did a quick search and found some reports of good results in your situation with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (chemotherapy given before surgery, rather than after.)Quote:
Originally Posted by jono
The new immunotherapies are starting to show promising outcomes in cancers that have in cancers that have been considered hopeless for many decades. (Now we have to figure out how to pay for them.)
My point is not that chemo is bad or that chemo is good. It depends. A lot.
Glad to hear you're doing well.
I hope you didn't take my mention of your comment on keeping up as any sort of ad hom. Quite the opposite, I think the fact that you would say that so quickly just illustrates how fast things are moving.Quote:
Originally Posted by old goat
I'll second everything else you said and add that reading was huge for me. I found things my docs knew and things they didn't on the NIH website (and Pubmed, but the searches on NIH seemed more productive for me). I'd almost claim that cancer can take up more of your time than TGR but I know no one would believe that.
I added more approaches on top of the chemo as a result of what I found, too, and while one doc compared diet to bringing a knife to an RPG fight I'm not convinced they didn't help. No one knows how much margin we had and a knife is better than nothing. (And it wasn't only diet that I found, either--hyperthermia, for instance, seemed to be supported and probably feasible just by taking on a flaggon or two of 135 deg water every day...I mean, it went straight to the tumor after all, right?)
Just checked my notes and found that the docs in Seattle were recommending about the same drugs, they just didn't have the same expectations. Their numbers were much less encouraging and they seemed totally unaware of the possibility of a complete response--or else they wanted me unaware of it. I think they were looking at a different trial of the same(ish) cocktail.
The "ish" comes from the fact that one drug, xeloda, seems to be often regarded as a simple substitute for another, 5-FU. My reading found reasons to believe it is likely better and not simply more convenient (it's an oral instead of a five day infusion). The data supporting that is early, though, and neither insurance nor all the docs seemed to buy in yet as of December.
BTW, yes, neoadjuvant chemo is very much becoming the standard for stomach cancers now, seemingly with the exception of signet ring/hereditary diffuse. Or perhaps some very early detection, but that's rare in the US where we don't screen for it (and seemingly ignore all symptoms).
FKNA, jono! Keep kicking its ass.
Jono--now that's a cool story bro.
A CGI Keef would play guitar like wasn't old and deaf :'(Quote:
Originally Posted by old goat