Quiet Riot drummer Frankie Banali has been admitted to the emergency room at Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Medical Center in Woodland Hills, California.
Over the past fourteen months, the musician has been battling stage four pancreatic cancer. Banali received the diagnosis after seeking treatment for shortness of breath, leg pain and lacking energy. This check-up resulted in doctors discovering a cancerous tumour in his pancreas. Banali has been receiving treatment since last autumn. He recently undertook his 21st round of chemotherapy.
The musician took to his personal Facebook page to share with friends and fans that he had been admitted to the Emergency room.
“Just admitted to the Emergency Room at Kaiser… It occured to me that this is just like Disneyland except the lines are shorter & the rides are painfully slow… and the price of admission… OMG!,” he wrote.
Despite the trials and tribulations of this relentless disease, Banali has kept a noble positive frame of mind. In an interview on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation, the rocker delved into his cancer battle.
“I’m still fighting the good fight. I’m still doing the chemotherapy,” he shared. “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.”
Banali also remarked about how his latest chemotherapy sessions caused him to lose his luscious trademark hair. “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 revealed.
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“So right now you probably wouldn’t recognize 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.”
You can donate to Frankie’s GoFundMe campaign to raise money for his treatments here.
