Bushwick Bill, the 3 foot 8 inch founding member of the celebrated Houston rap group Geto Boys, died Thursday night after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 52.
Prior to his passing, Bill had been on life support at a Colorado hospital on a ventilator, his publicist said. His loved ones were converging on Colorado to be at his bedside.
Read MoreThe premature rumors of Bill’s death had been prompted by his absence from a planned gig in Dallas on Saturday night.
Bill, who had dwarfism, was diagnosed in February with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and had been undergoing intensive chemotherapy as recently as May. He told TMZ at the time he was hoping to get back on the road.
“I’m going to fight this cancer,” he wrote on Instagram. “And with your support and prayers, I’m gonna beat it too.”
Advanced pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat, and while relatively rare, it receives outsized attention in the media and from cancer researchers because it’s so deadly. The cancer presents few symptoms early on and is hard to catch before it’s well advanced.
The greatest difficulty with advanced pancreatic cancer is the solid tumors. "It is the solid tumor [pancreatic] cancer that has the worst prognosis. It is right now the third leading cause of cancer death, soon to be the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States," Dr. Allyson Ocean, Medical Oncologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center, told SurvivorNet in an interview not related to Billy’s case. "Mortality is rising because it is caught so late and we don't have enough effective medications against the cancer."
And what's called a "stroma" makes it difficult for doctors to get at the tumor itself. "The cancer cells are surrounded by what is called a stroma, and the stroma serves as a barrier for medications to get in to the cancer to kill it," says Dr. Ocean. Stroma is tissue that surrounds the cancer tumor.
Treatment usually includes chemotherapy. "So chemotherapies have a hard time getting in, radiation has a hard time penetrating. Think of pancreatic cancer as an oatmeal raisin cookie and the raisins are actually the cancer cells, and the cookie part is actually all the stroma around it. And imagine having to navigate through all that stroma for a treatment to be able to get into a cell to kill it. So that's why the treatments just really aren't good enough to penetrate the cancer. But we're improving, we're getting better treatments."
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Born Richard Stephen Shaw in Jamaica, Bushwick Bill rose to fame as a founding member of the Geto Boys. While the group’s lyrics were too obscene to be played on the radio, their 1991 album “Can’t Be Stopped” still went platinum.
1991 was the same year that Bill accidentally shot himself in the right eye during an argument with his girlfriend while drunk on Everclear grain alcohol and high on PCP. He lost the eye and depicted his trip to the hospital on an album cover. Bill says he died and came to life during the incident, and became a born again Christian in 2006. In recent years, he had been facing deportation back to Jamaica due to a drug arrest.
Since he announced his illness, Bill had had a falling out with his tour organizers, TMZ reported, because he thought they were exploiting his terminal cancer. He chafed at the title they wanted to give his upcoming tour: “The Beginning of a Long Goodbye: The Final Farewell.” By contract, Bill had wanted to do a benefit tour for pancreatic cancer survivors.
When squashing premature rumors of his death on Sunday, Bill’s daughter wrote on Instagram that, “Certain people have been so quick to write him off as dead so they can capitalize off it.”
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