In 1991, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Shortly afterward, I was operated on and the whole thyroid was removed. No chemo or radiation was necessary. I was told that thyroid cancer is a slow growing cancer and has a path that leads from the thyroid to the neck to the lungs.

          A few months later, my wife and I were sitting at a red light in a snowstorm when we got smashed from behind in full force by a drunk driver. We both sustained back and neck injuries. We both had to go for MRI`s to see what the damage was. When they did my neck MRI, it also got the complete head. “I was told that I had a brain tumor, but it wasn’t cancer. I saw a specialist in the city and he told me it was a pituitary adenoma: a cist that grew from birth. It wasn’t life threatening at the time and they told me that sometimes they shrink and go away. So I kept going for MRI`s, every three months, to keep an eye on it. In 1994, it grew to the point of excruciating pain. It, too, was removed. The surgery was terrible. They went up through my nose to the center of my head, just below the brain and optic nerve. I spent four months on bed rest, at home, before I was recovered.

           The following year, 1995, the thyroid cancer had spread to my right neck. They did what was called a radical dissection of the right neck. Eighty-eight lymph nodes were removed and twenty-two tested positive for cancer. So it was three major surgeries in four years.

            I was clean for almost ten years when I was diagnosed with lung cancer in December of 2005. Part of my right lung was removed, and I spent two months at home recovering from that operation. In February of 2006, I started a barrage of chemotherapy treatments that continued into the late spring. I am currently clean and receive scans and check ups periodically. I’ve been a bodybuilder most of my life, and have been training at Lea’s Survival Gym in Seaford from the onset of chemo to date for a show in November at the “Tribecca Performing Arts Center “ in NYC on November tenth 2007. I’ll be 59 at the time of the competition and I’ll be in the master’s class 55 and up. I wrote a book about the last sixteen yeas of surviving cancer three times. The book is entitled “THREE STRIKES YOU`RE IN” with the last chapter the competition in November. It`s an inspirational story with a "Rocky" /"Karate Kid" ending.

Rusty Russo