Album Notes

CHARLIE LUSTMAN - Surviving cancer one song at a time

Singer, songwriter, producer and cancer survivor, Charlie Lustman, has recently completed the first ever pop music album about a cancer experience. Made Me Nuclear, his collection of twelve pop songs, is designed to help the millions of people affected by cancer by giving them a personal and uplifting account of his ordeal from diagnosis through recovery and beyond.

Charlie was diagnosed with an osteosarcoma in his upper left jaw bone on March 1, 2006. His dentist and periodontist could not diagnose what that little bump sticking out of his jaw could be so they did a biopsy. The results came back positive for one of the rarest forms of bone cancer. Statistically, Charlie would win the Super Lottery three times before contracting this kind of cancer.

After a week of frantically searching Los Angeles for specialists to deal with this dis-ease, Charlie landed at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars Sinai Medical Center under the guidance of Sarcoma oncologist guru, Dr. Charles Forscher. They quickly injected Charlie with nuclear fluid and ran him through full body CAT SCANS and several MRI’s before determining exactly what kind of tumor was growing in his jaw. Dr. Forscher then sent Charlie to the head and neck institute at UCLA for his surgery under the hands of Dr. Elliot Abemayer.

Four weeks after being diagnosed, Charlie was wheeled into the operating room where they used a power saw to cut away half of his upper jaw. When Charlie awoke, the skin graft (a procedure they use to remove a slab of skin from his thigh and apply to the exposed bone in his jaw) was more painful than the primary incision. They also had to drill a screw into the roof of his skull to hold the plate in place where his jaw once existed. Then came the waiting game. Both Charlie and his wife, Ri, waited ten days to know if they had cleared the margins, for the results could not be seen until the calcium deposits had drained from the bone. They learned that not all the cancer was eradicated and four days later Charlie was wheeled back into the operating room for another round of sawing, grafting and drilling. In all, Charlie lost three quarters of his upper jaw and most of the skin on his outer left thigh.

Then came the next ten days of waiting. Did the tumor move into his nasal cavity or his brain? The results came back negative and Charlie was able to breath a sigh of relief, but not for long. It was decided that a year of intense adjuvant (supplemental) chemotherapy was needed to insure that no other cancer cells had spread to other parts of his body. It was during this long and challenging treatment that Charlie decided that he would write a collection of songs about his entire cancer experience.

Exactly a year to the day from when he was diagnosed with cancer Charlie began writing Made Me Nuclear. Chemotherapy ended in April of 2007 and the UCLA maxillofacial department created a prosthetic mouth piece that would allow Charlie the ability to speak and sing again. It was a miracle that after everything Charlie endured, he was able to write, arrange, produce and sing this new body of work.