Good news for fans of Roger Ebert. According to news reports, the 64-year-old film critic plans to attend his annual festival for overlooked movies this month. The outing will be his public appearance since undergoing cancer surgery.
I have reported on Ebert’s medical progress in previous blogs, but this is by far the biggest piece of news (good news) that has been released since he had surgery last June to remove a cancerous growth on his salivary gland. That surgery was followed by an emergency procedure he underwent in July after a blood vessel burst near the site of the first operation.
In a recent edition of the Chicago Sun-Times (Ebert has been a film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967), he wrote that what happened was the cancer of the salivary gland had spread to his right lower jaw. Doctors then had to remove a segment of his mandible, and two operations to replace that segment were both unsuccessful. As a result, Ebert says he had to undergo a tracheotomy, which opens an airway through an incision in the windpipe, but he still cannot speak. To fix the problem, Ebert wrote, doctors must now “plan an approach that does not involve the risk of unplanned bleeding. If all goes well, my speech will be restored.”
In the meantime, he says he will indeed attend the ninth annual Overlooked Film Festival, which will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, though he will simply be watching from the audience and not participating in the discussions. The film critic also revealed that the decision to attend the festival didn’t come without a lot of consideration.
“I was told photos of me in this condition (my throat is wrapped in gauze and my mouth droops) would attract the gossip papers,” Ebert wrote in the newspaper column.
In the end, Ebert said he came to one conclusion: “So what?”
He went on to write that his friends were worried about unflattering photos of him being taken and unkind comments being written. He wrote that he doesn’t care. “We spend too much time hiding illness.”
Here, here!
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