Speaking on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation, Quiet Riot’s Frankie Banali has given fans another update on his ongoing battle with stage IV pancreatic cancer after first revealing his diagnosis in October last year.
“I’m still fighting the good fight,” he told host Eddie Trunk. “I’m still doing the chemotherapy, I switched to a different chemotherapy a few months ago. And the side effects on this one are pretty brutal, and they pretty much last into the next round of chemo. So you kind of don’t get a break for about three weeks, and then you get about maybe 10 days off, and then the cycle starts again. But it’s part of what I’m doing.”
Asked whether doctors had any positive news in regards to his condition improving, Banali described the ordeal as “not a sprint” but rather “the longest race I can possibly make out of my situation”.
“So you have to be really, really careful how you read into some of these things because something can look elevated, but then if you look at a scan — one of my internal scans — it’s not as bad as the numbers say. But it’s a deadly disease — there’s no question about it — and I know that that’s what eventually is gonna kill me,” he explained.
“In the meantime, I’m just trying to put that day off as far back as I possibly can.”
And while the 68-year-old has long been recognised for his mane of jet black curls, Banali revealed that his latest treatment has now caused him to lose his trademark locks.
“I knew that when we were switching from the first chemo formula that we were doing for almost a year to the new chemo formula, I knew in advance that the different formula was really gonna wipe out the hair,” he explained.
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“So right now you probably wouldn’t recognise me because not only did it take all the hair on the top of my head, but it took my beard, my eyebrows, my eyelashes. Let me put it to you this way: I have just really improved my Olympic swimming chances with the loss of body hair.”
Along with losing his hair, Banali added that he’d also shed a massive amount of weight as a result of side effects caused by chemotherapy making it difficult to eat or drink.
“The weight goes up and down, depending on how severe the side effects are. At the moment, I’m on one I.V. that lasts 14 hours a day, so we do it in the evening into the morning, and we do this at home — this is above and beyond the actual hospital and clinic visits. And then we do a couple of other I.V routines to help my immune system, so on and so forth.”
He continued, “The thing is that if I had to be on the I.V.s that I’m on, sadly, because of the coronavirus and everybody quarantining, including ourselves here at the house, it’s given me the opportunity to do those things without worrying about, ‘Okay, I’ve gotta jump on the plane and I’m gonna have to skip treatments for two or three days,’ those sorts of things,” he continued.
“Which I’m capable of doing — don’t get me wrong. Quiet Riot will play the first show during this whole coronavirus situation July 4th in Arkansas. So I will be getting on a plane and I will be performing and I will be social distancing,” he said.
Banali was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer after going to the emergency room for shortness of breath, leg pain and loss of energy, followed by a discovery of a tumour on his pancreas.
You can still contribute to Frankie’s GoFundMe campaign to raise money for his treatments here.
Check out Frankie Banali on Trunk Nation:
