SitcomsHeydayfan
09-03-2019, 12:07 AM
I never knew his end was THAT bad! It's awful and he hardly got any breaking or major coverage when he died because it happened at the same time as Hurricane Katrina. See the article below:
The March 2004 TV Land Awards would be Denver’s last public appearance. By November, both Denver and Dreama noticed that he was getting hoarse, but chalked it up to laryngitis. By March 2005, he had lost 20 pounds. Finally Denver realized it was time to find out what was wrong. He was referred by his family doctor to an ear, nose, and throat specialist who performed an endoscopy, threading a thin camera through his nose to look at his throat. After seeing an unusual growth around the voice box, the doctor sent Denver for an MRI to get a detailed view of the inside of his throat.
The scan results weren’t good news. Denver, 70, had stage IV hypopharyngeal cancer, a cancer in the lowermost part of the throat that connects to the esophagus and the windpipe. A large tumor had formed in Denver’s pyriform sinuses—small recesses on either side of the larynx—and had spread until it had invaded the cartilage of the larynx, the base of the tongue, the neck muscles, the thyroid gland and the submandibular lymph nodes along the base of the lower jaw.
A biopsy of the tumor revealed that, like 90 percent of head and neck cancers, it was a squamous cell carcinoma, meaning it originated in the outermost layers of the cells that make up the throat’s lining. These cancers infrequently metastasize to distant sites like the liver, lungs or bone, but they do aggressively invade nearby tissues and lymph nodes. “With these cancers we look more at the stage, or where and how far the cancer has spread, than at the grade, which tells us how abnormal the cancer cells are, for prognosis,” says Greven. “Denver’s cancer had spread extensively ... so that’s a very serious situation requiring aggressive treatment.”
In many ways, Denver was the classic patient. Pharyngeal cancers are two to three times more common in men than women, and most likely to be diagnosed after age 50. Denver, like 87 percent of patients with pyriform sinus tumors, presented late, when the tumor was already stage III or IV. “There is no good screening test,” says David Pfister, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “Tumors in certain locations, like on the vocal cords themselves, will often present sooner because patients become symptomatic even with early stage disease. By contrast, pyriform sinus cancers will often be more advanced before patients develop symptoms such as voice changes or difficulty swallowing.”
According to the American Cancer Society, the five-year survival rates for stage III and IV hypopharyngeal cancers are 36 percent and 24 percent, respectively. For the relatively few patients whose cancers are diagnosed early, the outlook is somewhat better—the five-year survival for stage I cancers is 53 percent.
Three out of four head and neck cancer diagnoses can be attributed to tobacco and alcohol use. “Because of the anatomy, the pyriform sinuses really get bathed in alcohol and smoke,” says Pfister. Like many patients, Denver was a lifelong tobacco user, smoking more than a pack of cigarettes a day, according to Dreama.
As a result of heavy tobacco and alcohol use, “it’s common to find cardiovascular disease and other serious health problems that can complicate treatment” in people with a pharyngeal tumor, Pfister says.
Denver was no exception. In fact, his heart problems were so serious that his doctors told him he would have to take heart medication before surgery, “if he was going to make it through the procedure,” says Dreama.
Denver did survive the surgery, but it wasn’t an unqualified success. “The surgeons had taken out so much tumor, there wasn’t much left to sew back together, but the pathology reports came back that Denver had positive margins, meaning there was still tumor left in his body,” says Greven. Because of his poor physical condition, Denver wasn’t a candidate for chemotherapy with cisplatin, which would have been the standard treatment along with radiation. And his radiation treatments had to be delayed while he built up enough strength to undergo a second surgery, a quadruple bypass to treat his cardiovascular disease.
By July 2005, four months after his original diagnosis, Denver had finally recovered enough from his surgeries to begin a six-week course of radiation. “It was a really terrible time,” says Dreama. “He could no longer talk, he had a stoma [a surgically created opening] in his neck so he could breathe, he could no longer walk, and he was getting worse and worse.” By the end of August, it was clear that Denver wasn’t going to get better. “We were hoping he would start to rebound [after] he was done with the radiation, but it wasn’t happening,” says Dreama. Instead he was battling pneumonia and unable to breathe without a respirator. By the last week of August, Denver had become totally non-responsive, not opening his eyes or moving a muscle. Several times his vital signs dropped low enough for nurses to rush Dreama into his room, thinking his death was imminent. On Sept. 2, 2005, Dreama let the doctors turn off the respirator, and he died the same day.
“The staff at the hospital had been huge Gilligan fans, and sharing the intimacy of the end of his life was almost spiritual for them,” says Dreama. “His legacy was the love of his fans. He always said that that made him richer than any residuals could have.”
https://www.cancertodaymag.org/Pages/Spring2014/Bob-Denver-Throat-Cancer.aspx
The March 2004 TV Land Awards would be Denver’s last public appearance. By November, both Denver and Dreama noticed that he was getting hoarse, but chalked it up to laryngitis. By March 2005, he had lost 20 pounds. Finally Denver realized it was time to find out what was wrong. He was referred by his family doctor to an ear, nose, and throat specialist who performed an endoscopy, threading a thin camera through his nose to look at his throat. After seeing an unusual growth around the voice box, the doctor sent Denver for an MRI to get a detailed view of the inside of his throat.
The scan results weren’t good news. Denver, 70, had stage IV hypopharyngeal cancer, a cancer in the lowermost part of the throat that connects to the esophagus and the windpipe. A large tumor had formed in Denver’s pyriform sinuses—small recesses on either side of the larynx—and had spread until it had invaded the cartilage of the larynx, the base of the tongue, the neck muscles, the thyroid gland and the submandibular lymph nodes along the base of the lower jaw.
A biopsy of the tumor revealed that, like 90 percent of head and neck cancers, it was a squamous cell carcinoma, meaning it originated in the outermost layers of the cells that make up the throat’s lining. These cancers infrequently metastasize to distant sites like the liver, lungs or bone, but they do aggressively invade nearby tissues and lymph nodes. “With these cancers we look more at the stage, or where and how far the cancer has spread, than at the grade, which tells us how abnormal the cancer cells are, for prognosis,” says Greven. “Denver’s cancer had spread extensively ... so that’s a very serious situation requiring aggressive treatment.”
In many ways, Denver was the classic patient. Pharyngeal cancers are two to three times more common in men than women, and most likely to be diagnosed after age 50. Denver, like 87 percent of patients with pyriform sinus tumors, presented late, when the tumor was already stage III or IV. “There is no good screening test,” says David Pfister, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “Tumors in certain locations, like on the vocal cords themselves, will often present sooner because patients become symptomatic even with early stage disease. By contrast, pyriform sinus cancers will often be more advanced before patients develop symptoms such as voice changes or difficulty swallowing.”
According to the American Cancer Society, the five-year survival rates for stage III and IV hypopharyngeal cancers are 36 percent and 24 percent, respectively. For the relatively few patients whose cancers are diagnosed early, the outlook is somewhat better—the five-year survival for stage I cancers is 53 percent.
Three out of four head and neck cancer diagnoses can be attributed to tobacco and alcohol use. “Because of the anatomy, the pyriform sinuses really get bathed in alcohol and smoke,” says Pfister. Like many patients, Denver was a lifelong tobacco user, smoking more than a pack of cigarettes a day, according to Dreama.
As a result of heavy tobacco and alcohol use, “it’s common to find cardiovascular disease and other serious health problems that can complicate treatment” in people with a pharyngeal tumor, Pfister says.
Denver was no exception. In fact, his heart problems were so serious that his doctors told him he would have to take heart medication before surgery, “if he was going to make it through the procedure,” says Dreama.
Denver did survive the surgery, but it wasn’t an unqualified success. “The surgeons had taken out so much tumor, there wasn’t much left to sew back together, but the pathology reports came back that Denver had positive margins, meaning there was still tumor left in his body,” says Greven. Because of his poor physical condition, Denver wasn’t a candidate for chemotherapy with cisplatin, which would have been the standard treatment along with radiation. And his radiation treatments had to be delayed while he built up enough strength to undergo a second surgery, a quadruple bypass to treat his cardiovascular disease.
By July 2005, four months after his original diagnosis, Denver had finally recovered enough from his surgeries to begin a six-week course of radiation. “It was a really terrible time,” says Dreama. “He could no longer talk, he had a stoma [a surgically created opening] in his neck so he could breathe, he could no longer walk, and he was getting worse and worse.” By the end of August, it was clear that Denver wasn’t going to get better. “We were hoping he would start to rebound [after] he was done with the radiation, but it wasn’t happening,” says Dreama. Instead he was battling pneumonia and unable to breathe without a respirator. By the last week of August, Denver had become totally non-responsive, not opening his eyes or moving a muscle. Several times his vital signs dropped low enough for nurses to rush Dreama into his room, thinking his death was imminent. On Sept. 2, 2005, Dreama let the doctors turn off the respirator, and he died the same day.
“The staff at the hospital had been huge Gilligan fans, and sharing the intimacy of the end of his life was almost spiritual for them,” says Dreama. “His legacy was the love of his fans. He always said that that made him richer than any residuals could have.”
https://www.cancertodaymag.org/Pages/Spring2014/Bob-Denver-Throat-Cancer.aspx