LARRY’S CANCER RECOVERY

‘I feel like a King’

LARRY King says he’s “feeling great” and is back at work after undergoing lungcancer surgery in July.

King, 83, who revealed his diagnosis last week, has been busy shooting episodes of his two Ora

TV shows, “Larry King Now” and “PoliticKING

with Larry King” (both also available on Hulu).

“It’s just lucky that they caught it so early,” King says of his cancer, which was detected during a routine checkup. “I normally have a chest X-ray ... and this time there was a spot there. The doctor said, ‘I don’t like it.’ I said I had to go to Norway and to London to make two speeches and he said, ‘You can go. It’s very small.’ I felt fine.” When King returned from his overseas trip, he underwent a CAT scan and a PET scan, which detected the Stage 1 cancer. “A week later I was in the hospital and they removed it. I was in the hospital for a week,” says King, whose past medical history includes heart surgery, prostate cancer and Type 2 diabetes.

“The surgery was weird; they go through your ribs with a camera. They showed me the chest X-ray [afterward] and [the growth] was gone,” he says. “Lung cancer gives you no warning; I stopped smoking 30 years ago but the doctor said it was definitely related to that. It’s a very silent kind of thing. It could be benign and still become malignant. Nobody likes surgery and anything can happen in surgery, but I never thought I was going to die. The doctors made it too easy.

“I had some shortness of breath for a while ... it’s painful,” he says of his recovery. “They tell you you’ll have some discomfort — but that’s the doctor’s opinion because he doesn’t have any discomfort. But I feel terrific now. I’ve been working all week.”

King says that the pain meds he took during his recovery caused hallucinations. “It drove me nuts,” he says. “It took the pain away, but I got delusional. One day I left a message for my wife [Shawn]. I told her I was in a hotel in Chicago and to be in the lobby in 10 minutes. Another time I thought I was in my house and they faked it to look like my hospital room and I was ordering people out. Then I thought I was in a movie and I was trying to get the director to explain the motivation of my scene.”

King has now been broadcasting, in one form or another for 60 years (his first job was in radio in 1957; he spent 25 years hosting CNN’s “Larry

King Live” before joining Ora TV in 2012).

“The surgery was July 17 and I was back [at work] 10 days later. My voice came back strong and my lungs are fine,” he says. “I’m back doing shows. I’m working today. I’m doing speeches. I’m going to Saudi Arabia, Riyadh ... a Jew comes to Riyadh to speak for the Crown Prince! The sad thing is that I lost my brother [Marty] soon after my surgery. He died of brain cancer. That was a tough one. He was 80 and we were very close. Then my dog died. It’s been ups and downs, and there have been better years, but on the good side, I’ve got my health back and I keep feeling good, keep working.

“I started on radio and did TV, satellite TV and I’m now on the Internet,” he says. “I love doing it, I love interviewing people and I’m still doing what I did 60 years ago.

“They’re gonna have to carry me out.”