POISON Drummer RIKKI ROCKETT Discusses Battle With Oral Cancer – "I Didn't Know What My Chances Were"; Audio

Speaking with Eddie Trunk’s SiriusXM satellite radio show, Eddie Trunk Live, Poison drummer Rikki Rockett discusses being diagnosed with oral cancer and the treatment he’s undergone.

Says Rockett: “I kind of clammed up for a while, ‘cause I really didn’t know what was going on, nobody did. So, June, I kind of got sick. I had this horrible cold, sore-throat thing, and they were scoping me and they were doing biopsies, and nothing was coming up. Finally a doctor at USC did a biopsy and took a look and he said, ‘I believe you have oral cancer’. And what it was is a tumor at the base of my tongue… This is very similar to Bruce Dickinson , very similar to Michael Douglas, similar to Tom Hamilton, as far as I know – I don’t know the details of his. And two adjacent lymph nodes that it kind of… Normally, it does spread to the lymph nodes; that’s typical. That’s how you find out you have it ninety percent of the time. I kind of freaked out, and I got this news before Brandon (Gibbs) and I went on stage before Farm Rock.

“I didn’t know what my chances were, how I was going to do. So anyway, I went down to USC, to all the doctors down there, and the first doctor I went to sat me down, looked me in the eyes, and he said, ‘You’ve had pretty good health all your life.’ He goes, ‘You picked one of hell of a cancer to get.’ He said, ‘It is very treatable, it’s very curable, but it is a son of a bitch to treat, and I’m gonna hurt you.’ And it scared the hell out of me. And I’m, like,’ What are you talking about?’ he goes, ‘About fifty percent of my patients wind up hospitalized through the treatments, ’cause you’ve gotta do chemo and radiation at the same time, or you gotta do surgery. And sometimes when you do surgery, you still have to do chemo and radiation. So we’re gonna try chemo and radiation.’ So I wound up doing the chemo. I did nine rounds of chemo of cetuximab, which is the stuff that the company that Martha Stewart went to jail for; she did the insider trading you know… I wanna say it was 2004 or something… That’s an IV, and it’s a targeted immunotherapy, so it’s not like the typical chemical that just kills everything. But they said one problem it does have is you get a rash. And I’m, like, ‘A rash?’ They’re, like, ‘Yeah, you’re gonna look like a kid with really bad acne.’ So I started to get it on my face and on my chest and on my back and shoulders and a little bit on my trunk, and then, bam, in two weeks, it just calmed down for some reason. So I was very lucky with that. But then I started radiation, and I did 35 rounds of radiation; it was five days a week for seven weeks, and that kicks your dick into the dirt. But I went, ‘Okay, this is what I’m gonna do. I wanna beat it, so I’m just gonna go head first into this. I’m gonna set myself up where every single day, I do something positive for my health. I’m gonna work out one day, I’m gonna go to therapy one day.’ I go to this occupational therapy where they do swallowing and speech and stuff like that, to keep your neck going. Regular therapy, acupuncture…”

Listen to the complete interview below: