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<\/p>\nRUSH: I wanted to update you on my health. And the first thing to tell you is I\u2019m fine. I\u2019m sitting here at my official home library desk, and I am fine. Now, here\u2019s where my problems began. The cancer I have, the lung cancer I have involves the mutation of a gene that occurs in 1 to 5% of lung cancer patients. Now, ordinarily that would be very bad news because it would be something that maybe there\u2019s no medicine for or that there\u2019s no targeted treatment for.<\/p>\n
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It turns out it\u2019s the exact opposite. It turns out it was good news because there is a clinical trial of a combination of chemo drugs that has been very successful in attacking this particular gene mutation in melanoma cancers. So the clinical trial that I\u2019m in — and I went into it with full knowledge that it was a trial, a stage 2 trial. I had every option every cancer patient\u2019s ever had presented to me by numerous doctors, numerous places, I chose what happened here.<\/p>\n
The stage 2 trial I\u2019m in involves targeting with two different drugs the mutation that has caused my stage 4 lung cancer. By the way, my voice is weak only because I haven\u2019t used it much. There\u2019s nothing wrong there. And everything was going along fine. The first four weeks we were all feeling great because they warned us that the side effects of this drug could be pretty bad. Normal things like nausea, vomiting, fatigue, none of that happened to me. So the first four weeks went by, we\u2019re kicking butt, we\u2019re thinking this was great. And we have some indications that it\u2019s working as well.<\/p>\n
Well, late last week I began to find it very difficult to walk. My muscles in both legs, from the waist down, began to retain fluid and swell up incredibly to the point that ten days ago, Monday of last week when we were away for treatment, I could barely walk in the hotel room and needed a wheelchair to get where I was going. I kept taking the chemo drugs, thinking that it would be something that I could get past. I didn\u2019t get past it and developed fevers of 102 to 103, which were also part of the list of side effects that could happen.<\/p>\n
The point is, after about five weeks on this stuff, it all just hit me. And all of last week I was unable to get out of bed. Primarily because I couldn\u2019t walk. The degree of pain and the swelling in both joints and legs — and I\u2019ll give you an idea of the pain. ‘Cause they asked me to describe it. I said, “Imagine you have been sedentary for a year and then one day you go to the gym or you go practice football or you do a two-hour, strenuous workout. You know how you feel the next day, your muscles are filled up with lactic acid, you can barely move?” I said, “That\u2019s what it\u2019s like times five for me.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, okay,” and they start writing it down, making notes. But I was not given anything for it. We just kept going with the treatment hoping that it would be something my system would metabolize and move beyond, but it didn\u2019t. So it got bad enough on — losing track of the days here. I guess it got bad enough last Monday or whatever that we had to pull the treatment. We had to pull the treatment, and it was going to be just temporary for a week or two to see what would happen. I\u2019m now taking drugs, steroids, to reverse the effects of the chemo drug.<\/p>\n
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Here\u2019s the irony, folks. The chemo drugs are working. They were… I\u2019m not gonna go into detail about how we know because I don\u2019t want to provide too much target area for media to go searching on the internet what I\u2019m dealing with. But, trust me, it was working — and it\u2019s working so well, the doctors want me to continue doing this and put up with the leg pain.<\/p>\n
“I can\u2019t do this,” I told them. “I can\u2019t do this. I can\u2019t work, I can\u2019t think, I can\u2019t… There\u2019s just no way. It\u2019s the same old question that cancer patients have. You have to balance quality of life versus length. So there are other alternatives that we\u2019re looking into. I\u2019ve currently suspended the treatment and we\u2019re looking at alternatives, and there are plenty of those. But I\u2019ve gotta get the swelling down and get this pain taking care of.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, I won\u2019t be able to do anything but talk to you from this desk on a phone. So that\u2019s the status of that. I\u2019m feeling much better physically having gotten off the chemo drugs. I think we dropped them Monday or Tuesday. (As I say, the days are running together.) So I wanted to share all this with you because there had been a lot of people concerned at the ongoing, extended absence, which is unlike me.<\/p>\n
And I\u2019ve made it very clear that the only place I really want to be during all of this — aside from at the side of my lovely wife, Kathryn — is in the radio studio. And the fact that you can\u2019t do that is frustrating, and it was something everybody was noticing. So I started getting little emails from people. You read between the lines, they\u2019re saying, “What the hell is going on! Where are you?”<\/p>\n
So I thought it\u2019d be wise and prudent to come in and share some of these details with you. I\u2019m looking at the clock. Let\u2019s take a break here and we\u2019ll come back after the break and we\u2019ll get back into some of the observations I\u2019ve had about what\u2019s going on with the coronavirus and what is happening to our country. It\u2019s the Rush Limbaugh program. I made it past the call screener. As far as I know, I\u2019m still on the air. I have not gotten myself thrown off yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: I wanted to update you on my health. And the first thing to tell you is I'm fine. I'm sitting here at my official home library desk, and I am fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":287437,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n