Poison drummer Rikki Rockett had a chat “This May End Badly With Craig Fraser” podcast, speaking about the friendship with Frankie Banali.
The drummer said:
”[Frankie] and his wife contacted me about two months after he was diagnosed, ’cause they knew what I went through. So I called my doctors down in San Diego to see if there was a trial for him, because pancreatic is really a bad one. So they made the trip down there — they took all the information to my doctors in San Diego — and, unfortunately, there wasn’t a trial, or a better trial, or any better treatment that was available at that time for that particular type of pancreatic.
So they said, ‘There’s no point in you coming all the way down here. You can pretty much get the same treatment. We don’t have anything different or groundbreaking for what you’re going through.’ But they kept an eye on him; they stayed in the loop. Regina, his wife, stayed in touch with him. And it went quiet for a while. And when I knew it went quiet, something was not good. When he was in the fight, I heard more from him and more from her.
He added more:
“It’s crazy, because I went through a similar thing. And when you’re in the fight, you kind of shut down a little bit from everybody. Because people, as well-intentioned as they are, like to tell you stories about somebody they knew that died. [Laughs] Or they want you to try injecting baking soda, or stand on your head when it’s a full moon with CBD oil. I mean, all this crazy stuff.
“When you’re going through this, you look at everything really quick, so it’s not like you don’t know what’s out there,” he added. “But there’s legitimate cures, and there’s not legitimate cures.”