For painfully obvious reasons, the Cardinals didn't open their home schedule Thursday against the Baltimore Orioles. The good news is that Bob Gibson would have been there if there had been no coronavirus pandemic-fueled shutdown of sports.
Diagnosed last summer with pancreatic cancer, Gibson, 84, had no guarantee he would see many, if any, more Cardinals openers. But now his chemotherapy treatments have been moved from once a week to every three weeks and he said he feels no pain.
Gibson is due for a couple of days of tests this week but for now, as he told someone recently, "The reaper came the other day _ and I wouldn't answer the door."
When a veteran reporter called him the other day, Gibson asked, "Are you still kicking? Me, too."
With Gibson having been slated to ride in the caravan around the track on Thursday, his scheduled chemo for this week was moved back a week.
"The problem with waiting that long is that when you start with your treatment it's like starting all over," the baseball Hall of Famer said. "You have a little 'sicky feeling.'"
Yet, he allows that, overall, he feels "pretty good.
"I don't know where I'm going with this disease but they'll take some tests and they'll see where it is," he said. "But I'm not in any pain. I haven't been in any for two months, maybe three. I've been doing this (rehab) for eight months now.
"I had a lot of pain in July, August and September and then in the fall it stopped hurting. But I had back aches and stomach aches. Right now, I don't have anything aching at all. The only way I know I'm sick is that the doctor keeps telling me. I tell him, 'Bull(feathers).'"
Gibson said he had had a feeding tube attached for several months.
"It was my idea to get rid of it," he said. "I had it in for a month-and-a-half without using it."
With the feeding tube in, Gibson lost 35 pounds, down to 170. But, his appetite restored, he now is closing in on 185 pounds.
