While he now recovers from major surgery, New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert has shared details of the cancer battle he has faced over the past couple of weeks.
New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert has revealed that he's spent the last two weeks in hospital, undergoing surgery to have a rare cancerous tumour removed.
The guitarist has taken to Instagram to tell fans about his private battle as he now stays at home to recover from the traumatic ordeal. Chad shares that his wife first found him unresponsive in bed on December 5, performing CPR and mouth-to-mouth until the paramedics arrived.
"Apparently I was doing something called 'agonal breathing' and was minutes from death," he writes. "I woke up with 7 paramedics surrounding my bed. I was so confused. My blood sugar somehow dropped to 20 and if my wife hadn’t found me, I would’ve fallen into a coma or died. The paramedics took me to the ER in an ambulance. They couldn’t figure out why my blood sugar kept dropping or why my blood pressure kept skyrocketing, even with blood pressure medication in my system. I was hooked up to two different drips I couldn’t be separated from.
"The next day, an amazing endocrinologist visited me and asked a bunch of questions about my health. It honestly felt like she was an angel from heaven. She told me based on all my symptoms that I have a very rare tumor called a Pheochromocytoma! It’s a tumor that grows on your adrenal gland and messes up all of your hormones. It was eating all my glucose, changing my hormones, and raising my blood pressure. I couldn’t survive without IVs until this tumor was removed."
Chad continues that a CT scan the following day showed that "my tumor was malignant and had grown from my adrenal gland onto my liver. It was huge. Which made my Pheochromocytoma even more rare since they usually are benign."
The musician moved to the ICU two days later, and had surgery scheduled for December 13.
"The only cure for a pheochromocytoma is surgery, one of my worst fears," Chad says. "But if surgery went well, all the glucose consumption, high blood pressure, and any other hormonal changes would immediately go away.
"When I got to pre-op, the surgeon drew the size of the tumor on a dry erase board to clarify how intense, large and dangerous my surgery was gonna be. But still reassured us he’s done many way more difficult. So grateful for him!
"The surgery was predicted to be 4 and a half hours but he finished it in two. The tumor wasn’t attached to anything tricky so they basically cut it out and peeled it off. But man this scar is insanely big. I couldn’t grasp how large the tumor was until now.
"I was sedated and drugged up and don’t remember anything from surgery day. My surgeon came in the next morning and let us know he got it all out!! Now we just needed the pathology report to make sure no cancer got in the lymphnodes."
Chad writes that he has since been able to come home to continue to recover from the surgery, and will know "about future treatments in a few weeks"
"I’m home with my wife and baby and so thankful to be alive!!"
Everyone at Kerrang! sends our love to you, Chad, and we wish you all the best for the pathology report.
