Hard rock legend Frankie Banali of Quiet Riot is recovering at home after recently suffering a stroke. Banali, who has been battling stage IV pancreatic cancer for the past 16 months, gave an update on his health in a social media post last night (Friday, August 14). He wrote: “Update: I spent the last three weeks in the hospital. Home now. Had two blood transfusions. I also had a stroke while there. I am rehabbing at home. Thank you for your concern and well wishes.”
Banali was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April 2019 after going to the emergency room for shortness of breath, leg pain and loss of energy. A scan of his lungs caught an image of his liver, which is where the first spots were seen. Then came the discovery of a tumor on his pancreas.
He has been in treatment since the spring of last year and recently completed his 21st round of chemotherapy with the hopes of shrinking or controlling the cancer.
In early June, Banali told SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation” about his cancer battle: “I’m still fighting the good fight. I’m still doing the chemotherapy. I switched to a different chemotherapy a few months ago. And the side effects on this one are pretty brutal, and they pretty much last into the next round of chemo. So you kind of don’t get a break for about three weeks, and then you get about maybe 10 days off, and then the cycle starts again. But it’s part of what I’m doing.”
Asked if doctors are seeing positive results from the chemotherapy, Banali replied: “It really depends on any given cycle, whether things are going up or whether things are reducing. The situation that I’m in is not a sprint, really — it is the longest race I can possibly make out of my situation. So you have to be really, really careful how you read into some of these things, because something can look elevated, but then if you look at a scan — one of my internal scans — it’s not as bad as the numbers say. But it’s a deadly disease — there’s no question about it — and I know that that’s what eventually is gonna kill me. In the meantime, I’m just trying to put that day off as far back as I possibly can.”