Last week soul-blues man Curtis Salgado underwent surgery in Portland, Ore., to remove a part of his lung containing a mass suspected to be cancerous. Doctors pronounced the surgery "successful" and Curtis is now home and on his way to what Doctors say should be a full recovery.
Remember he's got a great new disc out on Alligator Records called Soul Shot! Go check it out! And he's already got new midwest tour dates up at curtissalgado.com including
Zoo Bar | Lincoln, Nebraska on September 4, 2012
Check the official press release here
There is a chip-in set up to help with Curtis' medical expenses. Please share the link
During the last week I made the acquaintance of a few fellow friends of Curtis including BluesWax.com contributor Stacy Jeffress.
Stacy asked me to reshare this interview she did with Curtis for BluesWax.com in July 2010 about his experience with cancer and the health care issues that musicians, artists and others without insurance face.
Here is the text of her article.
Curtis Salgado Interview, from BluesWax.com
July 2010, by Stacy Jeffress
Reprinted with permission.
Imagine that you’re a self-employed professional at
the prime of your career, you don’t qualify for private health insurance thanks
to pre-existing medical issues, and you left your state’s high-risk pool
because you couldn’t afford the high monthly premiums. Then you get the news,
which feels more like a verdict than a diagnosis, that you have an inoperable
tumor on your liver, and you have 6 to 7 months to live.
That’s the situation Blues artist Curtis Salgado found
himself in 4 years ago. His only option for survival was to get a liver
transplant, an operation that is available to people with:
(1) financial
resources (Salgado didn’t have any), and
(2) a qualifying Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD)
Score (Salgado’s wasn’t).
A core support team came together
and, with precious little time, took on the seemingly insurmountable challenges
involved in getting Salgado the medical treatment he needed to survive. Shane
Tappendorf, the performer’s manager, took on the staggering responsibility of
raising funds. Tappendorf says he knew that with each evaluation costing from
$20-40,000, it would take at least $300,000 to get started. The plan was to get
evaluations at the Universities of California (San Francisco) and Washington,
the Mayo Clinic, and a transplant facility in Jacksonville, Florida. Tests to
determine the suitability of Salgado’s close friend Andrea Crawford as a living
donor ran $20,000. (She proved to be a perfect match, but more about that
later.)
Over
$200,000 was raised through a benefit concert held in Salgado’s hometown of
Portland, Oregon, in June 2006. Most of the expenses, including those for
production and promotion, were donated, the Rose Garden venue waived its fees,
and entertainers such as Taj Mahal, Robert Cray, Steve Miller, and Little
Charlie and the Nightcats contributed their time. Team members Kris and John
Bockmier coordinated silent auctions held in conjunction with that benefit
concert and another in Eugene which brought in significant amounts.
There
were also many benefits held across the country by blues societies, cash
contributions sent in from fans, and friends who cashed in their IRAs and took
out second mortgages on their homes in order to loan money to Salgado. When another $100,000 was needed at a
critical time, two of Salgado’s friends handed over their life savings knowing
they would not be seeing that money again anytime soon.
Strategizing
where to seek a transplant became team member Andrea Crawford’s full-time
mission. Although she and Salgado had been in a long-term relationship, they
had parted ways prior to the diagnosis. Salgado recalls with awe that once Crawford
learned of his illness, she quit her well-paying job and devoted herself to
researching each and every one of the 90-some liver transplant programs in the
U.S. The project demanded that she spend 10 to 12 hours every day for months in
front of a computer with a medical dictionary so she could decipher the jargon.
She wonders now, “What if we’d had 4 kids, and I had to work full time? He would
have died.”
Based
on the knowledge she gained through her intensive inquiry, Crawford is
currently putting a resource notebook together for YES, a non-profit
organization based in Texas, so that others in need will have the necessary
information all in one place. She learned from her legwork that most
oncologists don’t know all the treatments available for liver cancer. “If you
rely on your doctor,” Crawford says, “You won’t survive.” Through her
investigation, she discovered that every transplant facility has a list of
tests it wants performed and has a reluctance to accept results from the same
tests performed elsewhere. All those tests add up to more expense for the
patient. Salgado recalls that starting anew at the Florida facility would have
cost him $47,000.
Crawford also learned that each transplant center had its
own eligibility criteria for who it would accept into the program. The United
Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) sets the rules for who receives transplants, and
it employs the patient’s MELD Score as a method of prioritizing who receives
available donor livers. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex concept, the
general idea is that the sicker the patient’s liver, the higher the score on a
scale from 6 to 40: the higher the score, the more likely the patient will be
eligible to receive a liver.
Salgado’s score started at 11, reflecting the fact that
he was healthy other than that pesky lemon-sized tumor, e.g. the threat to his
survival came from the cancer and not from the liver. As a point of comparison,
Salgado says that the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center
required a MELD Score over 30 and had a waiting list of 2 years. Crawford says
that people with MELD Scores from 17 to 24 are the most likely to receive a liver.
If Salgado could have been “awarded” the points available
under the MELD formula for cancer, that would bump his score up. Ironically,
his tumor was too big for UNOS to give him the cancer points. For the same
reason, a transplant program in Seattle deemed him ineligible for a UNOS organ,
which must be pristine, but said he could have a UNOS-rejected liver, meaning
one that had Hepatitis C or other issues.
Salgado’s team became very concerned that he wasn’t going
to live long enough to receive a donor organ. Crawford knew that if the cancer
metastasized, he would have no chance of being accepted by any program. Salgado
says that 7 people die every day while waiting for an organ transplant. As he
describes it, “This egg was about to crack and explode and let loose cancer.” Since
qualifying for a cadaveric organ seemed unlikely, it became evident that accepting
a partial liver from a living donor was the best option. And it was Crawford
who provided the perfect match.
Since their romantic relationship had ended, Salgado was
reluctant to accept this gift from her knowing how grueling the procedure is
for the donor. From her point of view, making the donation was the only course
to take because it would save her friend’s life.
As
a man with nearly 2 decades of sobriety to his credit, Salgado very much wanted
to survive. He had started drinking at age 13 and says that for years, his focus
was on making music and getting high. “I partied hard and wasn’t thinking about
health insurance or retirement,” he remembers and, like many young men, he
considered himself to be bullet proof. When he made money, he invested in
inflatable dinosaurs instead of paying taxes.
(When Tappendorf later became his manager and worked to straighten out
Salgado’s finances, the artist owed $16,000 to the IRS.)
By
age 34, Salgado had developed hepatitis C and a cirrhotic liver due to
substance abuse. He refused to take interferon, the medication recommended for
treatment, due to the debilitating side effects which would interfere with his
ability to travel and perform as a Blues artist.
Years
later, he decided to begin interferon treatment and applied for insurance to
help with the cost. He had dropped out of the Oregon Medical Insurance Pool,
the state’s high-risk health insurance program, in 2004 due to the cost of the
premiums. Salgado met with an insurance agent and, at the salesman’s direction,
answered “no” to the question on the health profile of whether he had hepatitis
C although the point of getting the insurance was to acquire interferon to
treat that very disease. Naturally the insurance company quickly figured out
that Salgado had misrepresented his health status and the coverage was rescinded.
By then, the salesman, having received his commission, had retired, and Salgado
was back to square one.
He
eventually managed to qualify for an interferon program through a
pharmaceutical company which cost $5-600 per month. Three months later, on
March 13, 2006, to be precise, Salgado suffered a gallstone attack which landed
him in the hospital. The resulting CAT Scan revealed his 5.5 centimeter liver
tumor, and the race to save his life - sans health insurance - began.
Based
on a number of factors, including transplant success rate, the number of organs
received, and the number of people on the waiting list, Crawford determined
that the Transplant Center at the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha was where
they needed to be. Salgado concurred and found the helpful attitude of the
staff there a welcome change from some of the programs he had encountered.
Surgery was scheduled for Tuesday, October 3, 2006, with Crawford fully
prepared to give 60% of her liver to Salgado. She insisted on making the trip
east a few days early in order to garner some positive energy.
The
week before the surgery, Omaha added cancer points to Salgado’s MELD Score
which raised him from 11 to 24 and put him within range of receiving a UNOS
program liver. “What are the chances of getting a cadaveric liver?” Salgado
asks. “They put me on the list four days before I was about to take Andrea’s
liver.”
When
Salgado answered the phone very early on Saturday, September 30, a transplant
nurse told him he was getting a donor liver. He had an hour to report to the
operating room. “I just happened to have the right number, the right blood
type, the right size, the right situation, and the hoses have to be in the
right places, your little connections. You’ve got a couple of tubes coming out
of your liver, and not everybody’s is located in the same spot,” Salgado says.
“The odds are astrofuckingnomical.”
When
his diseased liver was biopsied, the doctors found that the cancer has
metastasized; there was a microscopic invasion of a blood vessel. Had that been
know before the operation, he would not have received the new liver.
At
his four-month check after the transplant, there was no evidence of further
cancer. Four months later, doctors found a spot on his lung. It became a
waiting game to see if the spot grew… and it did. On October 24, 2007, Salgado
had surgery in Omaha again, but this time the marble-sized tumor of liver
cancer was removed from his lung. “The
egg had cracked, and some cancer got out into the bloodstream and took off to
parts unknown,” he says.
Yet
he still received good news from the doctor after she had told him the tumor
had been removed. “I’m sitting there looking at her, and she goes, ‘Where are
the others?’ I kinda wait a little bit, ‘What do you mean, where are the
others?’ She goes, ‘There are no others and there should be. You are immune
suppressed which gives cancer even more of a reason to spread. And normally
when we see a metastasized tumor, you should have more than one tumor, and it
should be the same size as that tumor. We’ve checked your whole body, and we
don’t see anything anywhere else, and there should be more tumors, and they
should be the size of a marble which is the size of that one. Miracles are
cheerfully accepted here at the Omaha Medical Center, and this is one.’”
It
will be 4 years in September since the transplant and 3 years in October since
the lung surgery, and - knock wood – Salgado remains free of cancer. However, the
financial impact of the dual health crises will be with him for many years. His
sister Wendy Salgado is the team member responsible for paying the bills. She
estimates she has paid out nearly $1 million all told. She explains that they
had to have $300,000 in the bank to get in the hospital door, and attributes a
half million to the transplant procedure and related expenses.
By
the time of the lung surgery, Salgado was re-enrolled in the Oregon Medical
Insurance Pool thanks to Crawford’s efforts, so that covered 60% of the second
operation. (Although he was in the OMIP prior to the transplant, he had not
been in the plan the requisite 6 months to cover the cancer, a pre-existing
condition.) As generous as the donations were that poured in through the
various fundraisers, Salgado still had to accept loans to raise the necessary
funds. Tappendorf calculates that there is approximately $200,000 to be repaid
and emphasizes that Salgado missed nearly 2 years of touring, and the resulting
revenue, due to illness and recovery.
The
debt weighs on Salgado. “They didn’t give it to me; they loaned me their life
savings, but they have not bitched about it one bit. That’s what’s remarkable.
I’m the one who’s doing all the sweating. One person gave me $60,000, and
another person gave me like $35,000 and saved my life. Everybody saved my
life.”
-by Stacy Jeffress, for BluesWax.com,
July 2010, reprinted with permission.
You can contact Stacy Jeffress at
