DEVILDRIVER and COAL CHAMBER frontman Dez Fafara has revealed that he has been living with a tumor for close to two years, speaking publicly about the diagnosis for the first time in a new interview on The Garza Podcast, hosted by SUICIDE SILENCE guitarist Chris Garza.
The discovery came out of the health emergency that forced COAL CHAMBER to scrap a U.S. tour. “The vertigo thing really threw me off, dude, 'cause it was a great Saturday afternoon,” Fafara said. “I'd been running miles and miles on the treadmill every day, and all of a sudden I had vertigo out of nowhere, and that took me out for almost a year.” He collapsed at home, woke to his wife slapping his face, and was taken away by ambulance. Scans cleared up the vertigo — and turned up something else entirely.
“You don't wanna say this stuff before you book tours or before you're doing deals or before you're going out,” he explained. “But for, I would say, over a year, maybe almost two years now, we've been dealing with a situation where they found a tumor in my head.”
The cancer test came on Christmas Eve. “She was, like, ‘Hey, I got good news. It's non-cancerous.’ Dude, I jumped up,” Fafara recalled. “I scared the shit out of this woman. I jumped up and hugged her and lifted her in the air.”
The tumor sits near his jawline, on a salivary gland, and surgeons are not willing to operate yet. “It's gotta actually grow a little bit to be safe to go in, 'cause it's very unsafe. If they go to get it now, I could lose speech and a lot of other stuff,” he said. Operating at its current size could affect his blinking, smiling and speech.
Fafara credits fasting, diet and prayer with keeping it in check, and says his most recent scan showed it slightly reduced. “The last time I went in, it was a couple of months ago, and then [the doctor] said, ‘Hey, look, it's actually gotten a little, little bit smaller, which we've never seen,’” he said. “I'm personally gonna make it go away with dieting, fasting and positive thought.”
He was emphatic that the diagnosis will not stop him touring: “I'm not gonna cancel tours. I'm showing up in Australia. I'm showing up in August. Nothing's gonna stop that.”
DEVILDRIVER released its new album, “Strike And Kill”, on July 10 via Napalm Records. The band's North American tour with UPON A BURNING BODY and OV SULFUR begins August 14 in San Diego and runs through September 5 in Anaheim.