Rush Limbaugh gave an update on his battle against stage 4 cancer on Friday, here’s part of what he said:
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. Now, here’s 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’s no medicine for or that there’s no targeted treatment for.
It turns out it’s 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’m 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’s ever had presented to me by numerous doctors, numerous places, I chose what happened here.
He said the treatment caught up to him:
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’t get past it and developed fevers of 102 to 103, which were also part of the list of side effects that could happen.
He said it was working, but he has suspended the treatment:
Here’s the irony, folks. The chemo drugs are working. They were… I’m not gonna go into detail about how we know because I don’t want to provide too much target area for media to go searching on the internet what I’m dealing with. But, trust me, it was working — and it’s working so well, the doctors want me to continue doing this and put up with the leg pain.
“I can’t do this,” I told them. “I can’t do this. I can’t work, I can’t think, I can’t… There’s just no way. It’s the same old question that cancer patients have. You have to balance quality of life versus length. So there are other alternatives that we’re looking into. I’ve currently suspended the treatment and we’re looking at alternatives, and there are plenty of those. But I’ve gotta get the swelling down and get this pain taking care of.
Otherwise, I won’t be able to do anything but talk to you from this desk on a phone. So that’s the status of that. I’m 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.
So there it is, I’m sure we can spare a prayer for Rush at this difficult time.
He explains a lot more than I’m excerpting here, and if you prefer, you can read the whole thing instead.