CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - Musician Freddy Fender, who has been receiving treatment for cancer in Oklahoma, was transferred to a hospital in San Antonio because of a blood infection, friends and relatives said. Fender, 69, was flown late Wednesday from the Cancer Treatment Centers of America Southwestern Regional Medical Center in Tulsa, Okla., to a specialist at University Hospital in San Antonio for treatment, his daughter, Tammy Huerta Mallini, told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. She said her father will eventually return to Oklahoma. "We wanted to make sure he was strong and alert before he received any chemotherapy or radiation because that could heal him," she said. Fender started his career in the late 1950s and hit the charts with "Before The Next Teardrop Falls," "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights" and "You'll Lose A Good Thing." He has won three Grammy Awards, the most recent in 2002. He was to have surgery in early January to remove the upper left lobe of his lung because of a fungal infection, but surgeons found two large tumors and left the lobe intact. A scan later found nine more tumors. He received a kidney from his daughter in 2002 and a liver transplant in 2004. He has had problems with diabetes and hepatitis C.
My Dad passed away 8/21/06 from esphogeal cancer. He had gotten pneumonia about 4 weeks before he died. He had went thru 3 bouts of chemo and the last one totally destroyed his white blood cell count, which left his system unable to fight the blood infection. I have a feeling that the blood infection is probably a result of the chemo. All I know is he told me that he wouldn't advise anyone to go through chemo. He said it wasn't worth it in his eyes, but he did it because he was trying to hang on as long as he could for my Mom's sake. That's true love there when a loved one wants to go through that much pain and suffering to try and hang on to life as long as they can for someone else.