Poison drummer Rikki Rockett is battling oral cancer, the rocker revealed on Monday.
The 54-year-old musician revealed his diagnosis on SiriusXM’s “Eddie Trunk Live,” telling host Trunk that he was diagnosed over the summer.
“[In] 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. And 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,” Rockett told Trunk, Blabbermouth reports. “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 90 percent of the time.”
Rockett added that he has completed nine rounds of chemotherapy and seven weeks of radiation. He will undergo a PET scan early next year to see if the treatment succeeded.
The drummer said that, while his doctor reassured him, he also warned that the treatment for that particular form of cancer can be grueling.
“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 50 percent of my patients wind up hospitalized through the treatments, ’cause you’ve gotta do chemo and radiation at the same time, or you’ve gotta do surgery,” Rockett said. “And sometimes when you do surgery, you still have to do chemo and radiation. So we’re gonna try chemo and radiation.’
Rockett also revealed that he kept his diagnosis a secret to avoid intrusion by the tabloid media, among other reasons.
“I wanted to see how I would do with [the treatment]. And I didn’t want people to maybe come down to USC and [take] spy photos, like TMZ guys or something like that. And I didn’t want anybody talking to my family about it or anything like that. It’s, like, you wanna forget about it when you can. So when I first start to talk about it, [I didn’t want it to be a situation where] I’d be at the mall, and I’m playing with my little girl or something, and somebody would go, like, ‘Hey, man, how’s the throat doing?’ It’s, like, ‘I just forgot about it for the last forty-five minutes and now you had to remind me.’”
The musician, whose real name is Richard Allan Ream, has been with Poison since its 1980 formation. The group is known for such hits as “Talk Dirty to Me” and “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”