Lou Gramm Recalls Brain Tumor Horror

Just published is Juke Box Hero: My Five Decades In Rock N' Roll by original Foreigner frontman and co-founder, Lou Gramm. The book, which is co-written by Scott Pitoniak, deals with Gramm's early life growing up in the 1960's in Rochester, New York, his platinum selling songwriting collaboration with Foreigner co-founding guitarist Mick Jones, the band's meteoric '70s and '80s success -- not to mention Gramm and Jones' often prickly relationship throughout the decades. Gramm also discusses his successful battle with substance abuse and near fatal brain tumor in 1997.

Lou Gramm shed some light on the tumor that threatened to permanently derail his career and possibly kill him: "It was a non-cancerous tumor, but it was the size of a large egg and it was in my frontal lobe and it had tentacles wrapped around my pituitary and optic nerve."

Gramm was asked how he first realized that something was critically wrong with him: "I started getting incredible headaches -- worse than any hangover I'd ever had. My long and short-term memory started to become spotty, and my eyes would cross once in a while. And I went for an MRI and they said it was a large tumor, the size of an egg and that it had been there since birth, growing."