POISON's RIKKI ROCKETT: 'Today Marks Exactly 10 Years Cancer Free'

POISON drummer Rikki Rockett says that he is still cancer free, ten years after he was diagnosed with oral cancer.

Rockett offered an update on his health via his social media on Monday (July 13). He shared several photos of him taken during his cancer treatment, and he included the following message: "In 2015 I went to my ENT [ear, nose and throat doctor] because I was on my second round of antibiotics to cure a sore throat. I got scoped that day and not long after I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Head and Neck Cancer (Throat Cancer). Squamous Cell Carcinoma .I began a three month, intensive treatment plan that included radiation (5 days a week) and Chemo (weekly). Then you have to wait another three months to see if it worked."

Rikki continued: "The side effects were insane. I lost 30% of my body weight. I could not eat solid food. My throat hurt 24/7, I was tired, my throat swelled, I had radiation burns. I kept my hair, except that I had a radiation burn around the back so I had to cut my back off. My beard had a radiation line, so I shaved it off. After three months, I had gone from stage 3 to stage 4. The treatment didn't work. I was offered a surgery to remove my tongue. Me being the bullheaded thing that I am, I refused and I was able to find a clinical trial using a new approach called, Immunotherapy. The trial was headed up by Dr. Ezra Cohen and Dr. Sandip Patel at Moores Cancer Center / UCSD in San Diego. These men became my life lines along with Tony Le who was my trial co-ordinator."

Rockett wrote: "It was an intense first week of tests. The plan was this: Infusion every three weeks, two pills a day and every nine weeks, MRI, PET and CT Scans. I was told not to freak out if the first scans showed tumors to be larger. Day one was seven hours in the hospital on infusions. Night one was scary. I stayed in San Diego. My tongue swelled and I thought I might choke. I called Dr. Cohen, he said, 'This means it's working!' Nine weeks later I had my first clinical visit for scans. I was more nervous than ever in my life. If this modality didn't work, it would be more chemo, more radiation eventually, probably surgery. [Rikki's then-girlfriend, now-wife] TC was by my side that day. She was ALWAYS by my side. The assistant looked at the scans and I asked slowly, 'How do they look?' She said, 'Pretty good, actually!' Dr. Cohen walked in just then and said, 'This is near miraculous. Your tumors are 90% gone!' Two weeks later I pilled my car over to spit. Spitting had become routine. Something not much different than an effect in Evil Dead landed on the ground. I called my Dr… 'Dr. Cohen, I think I just spit out my tumor!'

"My trial was scheduled as a two year trial. It lasted nine months and I was declared cancer free just 18 weeks after I started. We stopped the trial because during the trial I developed another cancer, Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML). I was pulled off of immunotherapy and put on a medication called Gleevac. In two months my numbers dropped to almost zero cancer and finally after two years to zero cancer. From a pill!

"Dr. Jameison is still my anchor and she is a brilliant Dr. Thank God CML is one of the more mild things that you can get and I still take a daily pill to keep it away. It too is in remission.

"Folks, I beat two forms of cancer!" Rikki added. "I would walk through the infusion room and see people on a drug that was experimental for me, but now has become routine. I felt like I was part of something much, much bigger than I had ever been a part of. This very thing was an accomplishment, not just for the Dr.s, for me and my family, but honestly, for the world! I was one of the few that gifted that opportunity.

"I am not taking a bow, I am gracious for the chance. I was able to speak before crowds of Dr.s , scientists and people who wanted a new answer. This was bigger than anything I had ever done with POISON. I was part of something miraculous!

"Today marks exactly 10 years cancer free. One day before my son's birthday. We will celebrate together.

"All of this story is in my book coming out. It was tough to write.

"Everyone, be careful. My cancer was caused by HPV and is the #1 cause of of this in people my age and younger. Same for women and cervical cancer.

"If you ever get this or anything like this, take care of yourself, keep working out, get up and take a shower and look your best. Go to a shrink. Treat yourself and make yourself first and then you can come back and help others.

"Have a blessed day.

"Thank you to all my Doctors and forever to TC."

Rockett was declared cancer free in July 2016 after undergoing experimental immunotherapy, which eradicated the tumor.

In June 2015, Rikki visited his primary care doctor with a sore throat. His doctor found a small tumor at the base of his tongue, and Rikki learned he had human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oral cancer. He endured nine rounds of chemotherapy and 37 sessions of radiation therapy. The tumor initially responded, but returned three months later, spreading to his lymph nodes. Rikki then saw Cohen at UCSD Moores Cancer Center, who helped him enroll in a clinical trial of pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Rikki's tumor responded immediately. Just over two months into the trial, a scan revealed that his tumor had shrunk over 90 precent.

In 2020, Rockett told "Trunk Nation" that he was afflicted with the same type of cancer as what IRON MAIDEN's Bruce Dickinson and MEGADETH's Dave Mustaine had.

"It was base of tongue with an associated lymph node, which is pretty common as far as head and neck cancers these days," he said. "HPV-related head and neck cancers usually are base of tongue. There's a few people that I've sort of mentored or helped out, and many of 'em are musicians. And HPV is pretty rampant — it really is. If you have a kid, get 'em inoculated."

Asked what his symptoms were, Rikki said: "I had a sore throat that wouldn't go away. That was the main thing. And then I had a lymph node that was kind of sticking out. First, they tried antibiotics, and they didn't work at all — they didn't even touch it. So it was, like, 'Okay, we need to do a biopsy. We're gonna go down and scope and take a look.' And there was a lump down there. Then, after a few weeks, it started to get hard to swallow, 'cause the lump was getting bigger — the tumor was getting bigger. So I went and did the typical treatment for it, which is chemo and radiation, and it did not work. And by the way, it's a fairly curable cancer, especially with HPV — there's a high percentage rate of success with it, of cure. But in my case, it didn't cure, so my options were a whole lot less. My doctor told me recently — he didn't tell me this before — but he told me recently that I had about a 10 percent chance if I would have went down the regular path. But we didn't — we used immunotherapy, and it put it in remission in about 10 weeks. When it works, it is amazing."

Rockett first revealed that his tongue cancer diagnosis was caused by HPV — the most common sexually transmitted infection — in a 2015 interview. He said: "It is the number one leading cause of oral cancer these days. There's less and less of the truck drivers that chew tobacco for thirty years getting it, because people are more aware that that kind of stuff isn't good. So we are getting marathon runners and all these elite athletes with this. I have a friend that's a therapist, and five years ago, it was five percent of the people she treated, and now it's close to ninety percent."

He continued: "It can be spread sexually, but now they're saying that it can spread [through] deep-kissing and actually hand to mouth. I mean, if you see the Olympic swimmers, they swim and they smack their hand on the side of the pool for each lap, and their hands are full of warts and stuff from HPV. Now the wart kind of HPV is not the same as the strain that causes cancer, but it is spread almost identically. For men, you can't tell if you have it. For women, you can get a papsmear. But the doctor estimated probably it was 15 [or] 20 years ago [when I contracted it], and my body probably got rid of it, but it mutated itself and my body would probably see that again and get rid of it. But there's no way to tell who got it. I mean, I know a couple that's been married for 15 years and they've never cheated on each other, and they're pointing their finger at each other [after one of them was diagnosed with oral cancer], and it turned into a thing until the doctor sat 'em down and went, 'Look, you can get this so many ways.'"

Rockett's long-awaited memoir, "Ghost Notes: My Life In Poison", which was written with writer duo Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson, will finally arrive this summer via Rare Bird Books.

Press photo credit: Dean Karr (courtesy of Pavement Entertainment)