Neck Cancer Treatment Alternative

ADENOCARCINOMA / AIDS LYMPHOMA / BRAIN TUMOR / BREAST CANCER
BREAST, HEAD, NECK, DEEP TUMORS / INFLAMM. BREAST CANCER / PROSTATE CANCER / TONSIL-NECK CANCER
 Alternative cancer treatment, alternative breast cancer treatment, alternative prostate cancer treatment, alternative neck-throat-tonsils treatments

Neck Cancer Treatment Alternative Alternative cancer treatment, alternative breast cancer treatment, alternative prostate cancer treatment

An FDA approved alternative cancer treatment
These is a severe case of a patient who was in denial and did not want to subject his neck to a desfigurating open throat surgery, followed by high dose Radiation and chemotherapy, forms of conventional therapies.
He did not take care of the open wound cancer tumor, because he felt vey good physically, and had the hope the tumor would disappear by it self, in the same way "it came by itself"! These dramatic pictures show the powerful results of Hyperthermia combined with low dose hyperfractionated radiation. As Dr James Bicher MD says: "Rapid and aggressive growing cancer tumors, also respond very fast to Hyperthermia
(heat cancer treatment) in combination with low-dose-radiation".
 
Watch some Video Interviews with some of our "graduate" patients, at the end of this page:

One patient's result. These pictures were taken before and after the Hyperthermia treatment, combined with low radiation dose, on a neck cancer patient. Alternative cancer treatment, alternative breast cancer treatment, alternative prostate cancer treatment

After Hyperthermia Neck Cancer treatment, 03/08/07   

Valley Cancer Institute

Video Interview with Steve  

Host:  Carlos Caridad 

Steve:             I just learned five minutes ago that I have no more treatment! 

Steve:             Yeah, I mean, I heard last week that my scan was clear and that was – I was in shock. It was a wonderful experience.  

CDC:              Fantastic. So, you’re leaving our clinic, right? 

Steve:             Yes, I’m leaving tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon, when I get packed, I am tearing up the road to a little town called Tuttletown.  

Steve:             It’s in California. It is north about 350 miles and that’s where I’m headed.

 CDC:              So, it was a long journey over here in Los Angeles.

 Steve:             It was a long circuitous path. I went first to San Francisco. Actually, yeah, first I went to Palo Alto to Stanford where the doctors gave me their vision of what was going to happen. Then I went to San Francisco where the doctors there gave me their ideas. And then, my wife, what can you say? Thank you, thank you, my beloved, very wonderful wife. She said, “Okay, I’ve been researching this and you’ve gotta try Valley Cancer Institute. You’ve got to go there.” 

CDC:              Let’s go back a bit when you were diagnosed. What did you feel at that time?

 Steve:             When I was diagnosed, I wasn’t in a shock. I think part of me already knew. I’d had a cyst in my neck for 4 and a 1/2 years. It just kept getting bigger, which is what they said it would slowly, incrementally get larger. But I really didn’t have to do anything about it, because I’m a singer and they said that if they took it out, it might damage my vocal nerve. You hear that once if you’re a singer and you don’t want to surgically remove it right away.

                         But then I had a few other symptoms and these symptoms could be quite alarming. I actually had blood in my mouth a couple times after waking up in the middle of the night. So, that led me to go to the doctor again. The doctor eventually found out there was indeed now cancer in this cyst where there wasn’t before years ago. And, so when I found out, I learned something I already knew at some level, I learned that I had cancer. I think that somewhere, somehow I already knew that, because it wasn’t a shock as I said.

                         But what it was an opportunity to look at mortality and my life up ‘til then. To have a reality check! It’s a great gift. Very great, great gift that if everybody could do that, it’s a really good thing to do, when one reorients oneself. Now that opportunity hasn’t stopped, you see, because we all have that opportunity. As I went through – I don’t know, that was nine months ago. I went through this nine month process. I have jumped into that. You’re never out of it. Really, as a living person, you never really should be out of the idea that this life is a gift and a short flash.

 CDC:              So, you appreciate that gift more than ever?

 Steve:             You appreciate what you know is ephemeral. It’s like a flower.

 CDC:              And then when you were diagnosed, what choices did the doctors offer you?

 Steve:             Well, the diagnosing doctor, his first – it’s at least maybe two or three stages here. The first affair is to find out where this is, where it’s coming from, what is it? So, there’s the initial stage and he, to that end, did a biopsy on me very thoroughly in an operating room and I had cancer in my tongue and in my throat. So, they were looking for this – it’s like searching for the Holy Grail in the intro of cancer, the primary tumor and it’s sometimes difficult to find, and they never did find it. Now he put 16 or 17 holes in my tongue and the first thing they did was take my tonsils out. Later, when I healed up, they put 16 or 17, as I said, mining for the primary, holes in my tongue.

                         At any rate, they never found anything. I went to Stanford and the doctor there, a very competent, intelligent person, said, “Look, I think I feel it” after examining me. I think I feel it. I can get it right now. If you’re not squeamish, we can do it right here, right now, in the chair. Just right here in the examination room. He said we don’t really need an operating room. You’ve got the right color shirt on. I was wearing a red shirt and he was making a joke. I had to laugh. I said, “Okay, I’m not squeamish. You challenged my manhood. I’m not squeamish. Bah.” So, they laid me back and they gave me some Novocain, just like I was going to the dentist.

                         And then, the other guy held me down – his intern held me down, and he kind of got on top of me and he said, “No, you do it”. So, he handed the scalpel to the other guy and he held me down, and the student doctor was allowed to have his way with my tongue. He said, “Go in as deep as you can”. So, he took that scalpel and I thought he went all the way through my tongue. I lifted out of the chair because it was an extremely shocking experience.

                         And then he pulled out this plug and he said, “Boy, he got a lot of it. That’s great. Good job.” And, he said, “By the way, there’s another one over here. I didn’t Novocain this, but can you take it?” After that I said, “Yeah, I can take anything. Go ahead. Whatever. Just don’t take quite so much this time.” I couldn’t really talk. He came over on the side and that didn’t have any painkiller on it. It was just taking a hunk out and it felt like you might imagine it would feel. I jumped out of the chair again.

                         My wife was sitting next to me the whole time, holding onto my hand, and she was writhing in pain because I was squeezing her hand so hard. Alright, well, that’s kind of what it was. A week later, I went back and I was hurting. I couldn’t eat. Of course, that’s the thing, when you have your tongue operating on or your tonsils taken out, you don’t eat. You can’t really.  And I mean, it was morphine, pretty much. For the tonsils, it was morphine and it is a very painful experience. The tongue didn’t hurt quite as bad as the tonsils.

                         But they were negative – all these. Then, when I went to San Francisco, he said we should do another biopsy. I said, “No, man, my tongue has been more cut up then any tongue in America, okay? When is enough, okay?” They can’t find it. These guys, they thought they knew where it was. At any rate, they all laid out the basic program, which is the standard protocol for – it’s the standard way of doing things in this state and maybe in the whole country, which has been the same way for 40 years basically.

 You have a program and the program is we operate and then we do radiation and then, if we do that, we don’t need chemo. Or, we do chemo, radiation, and then we operate to clean up. Now, operate means, in my case because I had bilateral metastasis, I had little lymph nodes on both sides that had cancer in them. They wanted to do what is called a bilateral neck dissection, full dissection, which is to basically take everything out – all the glands, all of the lymph nodes, everything that has ever historically become cancerous. That’s what they wanted to do.

 So, the basic program everywhere is to do this, either you start with the – I don’t know where we were when we left off, so let me just… Ah, yes. The basic program in this state is to do surgery and then follow that with radiation, in which case you don’t need chemotherapy. Or you do radiation with chemotherapy and then clean up with surgery. Now, the surgery, in my case, would have been bilateral, because I had metastases. I had little lymph nodes on both sides, plus I had the cyst that had apparently had cancer in them.

 Now the problem is that the surgery was complete. It was a full neck dissection. Now, what a full neck dissection means is everything comes out, all glands, all lymph nodes and anything else that is historically shown possibly to get cancer is removed. That, after radiation, is problematic, because the healing after a full dose of radiation is not quite the same as healing the normal tissue without radiation.

 At any rate, I was asked – I asked them, the doctors, so, what can I expect when this is done? And he said, “Well, the best case is a cop, who now its three years later, and he said he’s just about 90%.” This is three years after the operation and he said he’s back to wherever he’s going to be, but it’s about 90%. And that’s the best case. So, I said, if that’s the best case, what’s a kind of normal case? He said, “Well, you know, it’s better than 50%. You’ll probably be able to talk and you’ll be able to swallow.” I said, “Well, in the course of the treatment?” And he said we’d put a feeding tube in. This is at Stanford.

 In San Francisco, at UCSF, they have a policy of really not putting feeding tubes in and doing everything they can do to not have feeding tubes go on, which I think is good and an improved policy over the feeding tubes. However, I did have a friend of mine, a couple of years ago, go through this and he had to have a feeding tube, which is a difficult thing. Your muscles forget how to swallow, so reeducating the swallowing process is a serious problem. Some people have a tube in for a couple of years, just because they haven’t been able to learn to swallow again.

 Others, who can swallow, have their esophagus that has shrunk so much that food just won’t go down. It’s not used for anything for a couple of years. It loses its elasticity. So, in my case, I have had to have liquid food for, I don’t know, a couple of months out of the six months that I’ve been at Valley Cancer Institute and that was in the midst of the toughest part. They say that head and nose is a difficult cancer to treat.

 CDC:              But after being in San Francisco, you wanted to do something else. You had seen…

 Steve:             Oh, we were both – it was after going to UCSF and having them basically just tell us the same thing as Stanford did with a slight twist, which was singing will probably not happen, but maybe. There was a – I’ve got the sense of a 20% possibility that I would sing, but it’s possible that I would have. I just felt it in my heart of hearts I wasn’t probably going to be able to resume my life anywhere near the same way. So, my wife and I just made the choice really that the quality of life is as important as the duration. We looked for something that possibly could offer us a higher quality.

 CDC:              How did you find us?

 Steve:             That’s all my wife. She – I said we looked. We didn’t look. She looked. And when she saw something, she brought it to me.

 CDC:              Did you find us on the internet?

 Steve:             She found you on the internet. That’s true. It was not the greatest of all the websites. Let me just tell you, if you go to Stanford and you walk into the oncology temple, this beautiful facility, this gorgeous cathedral to appealing. And you walk into this massive foyer with literally, not just a nine foot Steinway grand piano in the foyer, but a woman playing beautiful classical music all day long, or different people. I don’t know. There were two different people on the two times I was there. A balcony over looking it, it looked like a ballroom. Then you go in to the waiting rooms where they have full screen ambient TVs showing nature with running water, huge television screens, and you have two or three of them just like that. This is just for the cancer department.

                         Then you go into the examination room and they’re just like every other examination room. There’s only so much you can do to a doctor’s office, although, dentists, I just say in general, really dress them up pretty great. But Stanford is obviously, it was like almost dying and going to heaven just to walk into the waiting room.

                         And then you come to Valley Cancer Institute, which has no frills. It’s sort of like going from Paris to Havana. It is like sitting in a Rolls Royce and then you get out and your next ride is a taxi, okay? But you’re still going to get there. You might bet there faster in a taxi, who knows, but you’re going to get there.

                         So, I figured, hey, I’m comfortable with Spartan accommodations. That’s not an issue for me. What’s an issue is competency – can the people do what they’re doing or not? Now, in the case of the finest – and I have to say I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for Stanford in particular because – excuse me – as a teenager, I had retinal detachment in my left eye and when I was 20, I had it in my right eye. And they took care of me at Stanford, and I would be blind right now if it weren’t for Stanford University Medical Center, and a particular doctor, Angelo Delaporta who was a genius and just did it for me.

                         Now, having said that, there were some serious mistakes going down the last time I visited Stanford and we’ll just leave it at that. So, every place I’ve been, people are people. Human beings are no flawless. Everybody makes mistakes. This is something I saw right at the very top and I’ve seen it all the way down. Now, the question isn’t making mistakes because everybody does and every patient has to be responsible for their own care. It’s helpful if you have a partner like I had who is more on top of it by far then I’ll ever be, but still – it comes right down to where the rubber meets the road and where you’re standing as a patient, because you only own in this life the square yard of turf you’re standing on. The rest of it, people are looking out for their own interests. They have many interests. People have many patients. You have only got just one if you’re in my situation. At any rate, when I came here, I found competency, I didn’t find sumptuous surroundings, but I found a level of communication that I didn’t find in other places.

 CDC:              Now, if you could explain a little bit that level of communication you just said.

 Steve:             It’s – having worked in groups a lot in my life, I’m a musician. I play in bands. I’ve played in bands since I was little, 13 when I started playing in bands. And musical communication is of a very high level. You have to have a really good communication. On stage, it’s almost telepathic. You have to be able to feel and know what people are doing, but still, it’s not always that good and when you’re sitting around a room, with a table like this one, having a conversation with the people in the organization, and there’s bands and there’s managers and there’s road managers and there’s roadies and there’s all this. So, a band of four people might have nine people sitting around a table and that kind of communication is just not quite that telepathic, but what I’ve noticed is the rule of thumb is over-communicate. The rule of thumb is to keep the channels open, even if you have to have five different things communicated to get the right communication down. It’s much better to open the communication and keep them open.

                         And I’ve seen a lot of that. People will communicate around here and they’ll say something and the other person will say, “Let me check on it”. I don’t know if that’s real. They’ll check on it and they’ll be right back to the other person and they’ll say, “Yeah, that isn’t quite what it is. It’s this and this and this.” Okay, so I talked to that person and I’m back. I talked to that nurse and there’s been a change. Things change around here quickly and there’s a lot of fluidity and a lot of ability to take into account other peoples situations. So, patients, for instance, find this very helpful because if I’m scheduling, there’s a tremendous flexibility on the part of the staff to accommodate me as a patient. This was a good thing. I could call in and reschedule because I was not feeling particularly well and they would push it back a little bit if possible. They would tell me when there was an opening. They would call me. The people in hyperthermia, especially the people I dealt with in scheduling most, and they were really very helpful.

                         But, in general, also, communication is there plus there is communication there about my situation which is good. I want to know. I want to know and I did. I felt like I did know most of the time. When I didn’t know, being a proactive person who’s been beat up a little bit in the course of his life for mistakes and having mistakes made upon me by other people, I’m very cautious about what I have done, so I’m checking all the time.

 CDC:              Before you started the hyperthermia…

 Steve:             Oh, yeah. When I came here, my wife was – this is how it is in marriages often or in life. My wife was completely, had total faith, 100% faith that this thing – that I’d be sitting here right now saying these things.

 CDC:              How did you feel when you had your first hyperthermia treatment?

 Steve:             Very relaxed. It’s a relaxing experience.

 CDC:              Relaxed, yes.

 Steve:             It was relaxing. I was lying down for an hour with a warm feeling on my neck. About 45 minutes later, somebody woke me up. That’s what it was like the first time I did it. And subsequently, it was like that. Hyperthermia is a very relaxing treatment for me.

 CDC:              Was there ever a time where you doubted that you were not going to be getting well?

 Steve:             Oh yeah. Oh, no, no, no. If you don’t doubt, I don’t think you are a human being. You don’t have a mind if you don’t doubt. One of the things that brains are set up today is to survive. And one of the ways we survive is by doubting. Gee, I don’t know, is this the right thing? Is this the right thing? But doubt, at some point, I would see people who are doing what I’m doing right now, which is leaving with a clear scan, and having a program in front of them where there’s a sense of – okay, people aren’t just dropping me off.  I have a sense there’s follow up involved.

 CDC:              How would you describe in general your experience having had remained at Valley Cancer Institute? How long was the treatment?

 Steve:             I started really having – I came – my first day here was December 15^th, but I really – there was Christmas vacation and holidays. Okay. January 1^st, we’ll say, that’s when I started getting the full weeks of treatment in the total program and here it is June 10^th. I’ve been here 6 months basically.

 CDC:              But you were off a couple of weeks?

 Steve:             And the beautiful thing about it in my particular case, there is a – the standard of care, as it’s usually referred to, in places like Stanford and all around this country is 180 rads per day, five days per week for six or seven weeks. That’s as much as the body can stand at that level of radiation. This is different. There’s a stepped down approach, where the radiation goes for a while at 180, steps down to 150, let’s say, down to 120, down to 100, that sort of motif. And it may be not be exactly those numbers, but that’s the basic concept.

                         Plus, there is – so there is the sense that no, this basic assumption that it has to be applied hot and heavy as the human frame can handle or it won’t kill the cancer. That’s the basic assumption. It won’t kill the cancer if you don’t do it that way because the cancer will have time to regroup and you’ll never get a clear scan, because the cancer will actually grow if you don’t do that. Well, I don’t know, but I’ve seen it in other people and I’ve seen it in myself, that that isn’t the case. Here with the step down, first, they don’t offer hyperthermia in the same way. Maybe that’s the ancillary treatment to the synergistic effect of hyperthermia and radiation that the other institutions haven’t figured out yet. They’re never going to figure out unless they check it out.

                        So, at any rate, what we have here is that I started getting sores, but Sylvia, the person in charge of giving me the radiation downstairs, said, “you know, you can back off a little bit. If this is really hurting you too much.” “I can?” “Yes. You can slow it down a little bit. I’ll talk to the doctors upstairs and make sure we’re all in agreement, but okay.” And that’s what I did. I took days off. I stretched out a little bit more. When I was really – because as I said, head, neck or throat cancer is – there’s a lot of stuff happening here; a lot of processes like breathing. When my tongue swells up, it’s very difficult for me to breathe at night and sleep. My tongue relaxes, falls back into my throat and I can’t breathe. I can breathe, but it’s tough. That was only really exasperated to the point of a real problem during the peak of my treatment.

                         So, by not having such intense five days, if I went for four days and had a three day weekend, just that one change was sufficient to give me comfort and to heal my sores. And suddenly, I’m a new person, that one little change.

 CDC:              And how can you describe your health improvement physically and emotionally?

 Steve:             Oh, well, I’ll tell you. Physically, I’m still in the midst of the effects of six months of radiation and for some people, that will go on from what I understand for a couple more months. The radiation hangs in the body and continues to do what it does. I lost some weight from not eating. And I started losing weight last summer when I had my tonsils out. So, that’s real. I’ve went down to kind of a plateau. I’m not losing anymore and I’ve kind of been gaining a little, but that’s kind of been hanging in there, but I’ve never really felt bad. I felt good.

 I worked out the whole time I was here to some extent or another – walked, running, I was at the gym for a while, but I instinctively, I could do what I needed to do at home by just using some free weights, nothing big, but just to keep me in shape. Swimming in the ocean, I still go swimming in the ocean. It’s something that I do. I try to stay active and I don’t eat a special diet. I don’t think that’s particularly necessary. I do feel that – I don’t think it’s very wise for a person that’s losing weight to start dieting and, at least in my own case.

CDC:              And, you mentioned before in talking that you went to go see a much respected doctor here in Los Angels? 

Steve:             Well, this was a fascinating experience. But before you do that, let me just tell you about the other components, the emotional components. That has been a huge thing. First of all, it’s a very emotional experience to find out you have cancer, even if you thought, like I did, somewhere deep inside that you might have cancer. It’s a very emotional experience to confront your own mortality. And the emotions are equivalent to the intensity of your living. The question is then how does one come to grips with things, the intensity of life and the intensity of your emotions. And, I guess, maybe the biggest breakthrough I had in this process occurred in the midst of it when I was able to confide in my wife some parts of myself that I had never shared with anybody.  

This was a huge experience of confronting some inner demons and letting go, so that created a whole amount of psychic and emotional space. And I do feel that – also, you asked me a question about if I doubted. Yes, doubting, but at some point, one changes one’s thinking, that’s important too. Emotional space and open mindedness, because as ones becomes the other – I had to be, not just willing, being able to conceive and think of myself as completely healthy and cancer free, and hold that as a reality in my thinking and the possibility of it, the reality of it, and that started a couple of months ago and it came out of one conversation with one person. Just out of that conversation, I allowed my thinking or somehow opened up my thinking to include the possibility of health and well-being as reality.  

CDC:  That’s fantastic. 

Steve:             Yeah. And that’s the biggest thing for me. Now, as far as this other doctor, he was a great guy. We had two doctors’ appointments and that was about a month ago with my wife and me. It was getting to a point where I know I’m getting close to the end. Okay, so I wanted an opinion. I wanted to be looked at by the best ENT I could find, so I found a much respected surgeon from Cedars Sinai, who also had one day a week as a private practice, so I was squeezed in with 26 other patients on her one day.  

                        She examined me very thoroughly and said, “Yes, you’re doing great. Considering what you’re doing, you’re doing very well. And, by the way, those bleeding events that you had that got you, the throat and the bleeding in the throat you were talking about, that may have been the primary tumor being fractionating by your body. There may be no primary tumor. There may just be nothing and it was basically broken up by your body, but we don’t know.” And so then she went on to tell me – I said, “So, what if I get a clear scan and I’m all done over there and I’ve had all my radiation and there’s nothing there?” And then she said, “Well, then, come over to me.”  

                        I said, “Well, what will you do after I’ve got no cancer, I’m cancer-free?” “Well, then I’ll give you a neck dissection on both sides just to make sure, to make really sure that this is never coming back.” I said, “Well, but isn’t that really kind of a lot of risk and torture for what? I mean, will that expand my life? Is there statistics about how that will do it after what I’ve done, because I don’t think you have statistics on the effects of this sort of things on people who’ve done what I did?” She said, “No, but then, by the way, if you didn’t – since you never found the primary tumor…” and I said, “yes? But it’s not there. They did a scan on it. There’s nothing there.”  

                        She said, “Yeah, but we’ve never found it. We don’t know that for sure. I’d want to biopsy that again.” And I said, “Well, how would you do it? We have the idea that it’s way down at the base. It’s three inches down from the top of the tongue, way back in my throat way at the base and very hard to get to.” She said, “Oh, I have a way. I’ve got a drill and at the end of the drill, we put a core and we just core right on down.” 

                        And I said, “Core?” And she said, “Oh yeah. Three eights of an inch or something like that.” “About how far?” and she said, “Oh, about four inches. We’ll go all the way down.” And then I said, “What if you don’t find it?” “Well, we’ll do another core.” “You mean right next to it?” “Yeah, we’d do another core where we thought it was.” “And if you didn’t find it again?” “Well, maybe one more. I think that’s probably all you could take.” 

                        And I said, “Okay. Then what would happen if you did find it?” “Well, then at that point, we’d just to be safe, we’d want to take your tongue out.” And then my wife said, “Well, could he sing? Then what would he do? Could he eat?” And he said, “No, we’d take some of your leg muscle and we’d put it in and fashion you a new tongue.” “Could he sing?” and then she said, “Different.” And then she turned on her heels and walked out of the room. I got to go. Good bye.  

CDC:              How did you feel at that time? 

Steve:             As she was leaving, I said, you guys, you would just do this to me? I know what this is light. You’ll likely say you’re going to drill two holes in your tongue? I’ve already had 18 holes poked in my tongue. I know what it is. How can you say that? And then she split. I went to another doctor that morning or later after that appointment who was a wellness doctor and approached the thing much more like the way Valley Cancer Institute approached it, which is there’s a way to treat people that is humane as well as protective. You don’t just have to have one or the other. 

CDC:              So, you said it was a long journey, but was it worth it? 

Steve:             Oh, yeah. Well, right now, you’re sitting in my chair asking me that question. No, there’s no question.

 CDC:              If you had to tell somebody else about your experience at Valley Cancer Institute, what would you say?

 Steve:             Well, the first thing is, as a cancer patient, the thing you want to see is a clear scan with you not having any cancer. That’s kind of like the point in a way. Now, if they can clear – if this program can clear you out and keep it clear, it’s got a good non-return rate and Valley Cancer Institute was actually higher statistically in the studies I read on it then the standard care treatment is for throat, head and neck at least. That’s the one I checked out.

                         So, if you can have it go away and your chances of having it come back are better than if you went to places like Stanford or UCSF or any of these other places that are using the standard of care, then you say, well, great, what’s the downside? Now the downside has to be that you’re here for a longer time because some people have – but it’s only an apparent downside. You’re here for a longer time, but I’ll tell you what. I saw some of the patients that were released from the standard of care after they were only there for five weeks and they took months and months and months of recuperation at home. Where, as you can see, my recuperation happened during the time, while it was happening.

                         I’ve been recuperating. So, right now, I’m going to go ride my bike when I’m done here and I’ve already been on some of my weekends, going up to work. I worked. I took four or five days off from radiation – no, I did. I took five days off from radiation, so I could work five eight-hour days outdoors. What I do is landscaping, so I was actually installing a water feature in someone’s front yard. We did what we needed to do and we got the job done and it felt great to go back to work in the middle of having this process.

 CDC:              I really don’t know this, but I’m asking it. We’re not pretending you have 100% of your voice to sing, but how do you feel about that?

Steve:             I don’t have 100% right now, only because it’s not so much my larynx, my vocal cords. They’re in great shape. It’s just that my tongue is still swollen and because the radiation hangs on for a couple weeks or months, that’s going to keep – that’ll be there as long as the radiation’s there. I’ve done five really nice singing engagements while I’ve been doing this. Yeah, yeah, I have. I’ve got one coming up next weekend. Not this weekend, but the weekend after that. Previous ones – almost all of them were in the Napa Valley. That’s where I usually work, at wineries and weddings and I haven’t had any problem. I haven’t been 100%, but I’d say that right now, even during the treatment, I’ve been around 90%. I haven’t had any problems of not being able to complete the gig, like stopping because, oh, I can’t do this. No, I was able to do them all.

CDC:              It seems like you have signs of normalcy. Like you’re not…

 Steve:             Well, I’ve never been normal. Let’s face it now.  

CDC:              Close to normal. Steve, is it possible for you to sing us just a little bit of your singing? Just any time.

 Steve:             Yeah, yeah. Oh, I can sing you something, but you’ll have to do something – give me a copy of this, so I can put it on my website, too, because that’s going to be humorous for me. 

CDC:              Let me hear. Steve, I really appreciate you talking to us. We feel as happy as you, and it’s so nice to meet you as you are leaving. I wish I would have talked to you before, because I really enjoyed talking to you.  

Steve:             Yes, it was very enjoyable talking to you, CDC. Thank you.  

CDC:              And since you are leaving and I won’t see you again, I want to give you a hug. 

Steve:             Can I sing? 

CDC:              As you go. But it was fantastic talking to you. I really appreciate it. I like very much the color of your shirt. 

Steve:             Whatever this is? 

CDC:              I have a red shirt that is very much like that.  

Steve:             Yeah? I feel like I’m going boating whenever I wear this.  

CDC:              Thank you so much. 

Steve:             Great to be here. 

CDC:              Are you a tenor?