Jackson Had Skin Cancer, Health Problems, Before Death

As the news reports and rumours surrounding Michael Jackson’s shock death on June 25 keep pouring in, biographer Diane Dimond has added another, claiming an “unnamed family source” informed her that the singer had a cancerous lesion removed from his nose just days before he suffered an alleged cardiac arrest.

“Last week, I had two real sources call me and say he’s getting surgery right now for removal of skin cancer off his nose,” Dimond revealed. “This is not a man who suffers pain well. He likes painkillers. So he got some from here, he got some from there – who knows how much.”

While this new information could prove vital for those investigating the King of Pop’s death, it’s merely one of many instances over the last month of his life involving high doses of narcotic painkillers.

Other sources have revealed that in his final months, Jackson was suffering from extreme insomnia, and had become practically nocturnal in his sleeping habits. When the rehearsals for the tour hit full swing, however, it “totally screwed up his system.”

“For the past 15 years, Michael always slept until 3 or 4 in the afternoon and was up all night,” the source said. “When he started rehearsals for the tour, it totally screwed up his system.”

In order to rise earlier and sleep less, Jackson began adding stimulants to his “daily drug regimen,” the source added. One such stimulant is believed to have been the powerful hospital-grade drug, Diprivan, which the singer’s former nurse Cherilyn Lee “repeatedly” refused to give to Jackson.

Lee is adamant that she never obtained the drug for the singer, however, a strange phone call she received from Jackson and his people just four days before his shock death has left her to believe that he’d somehow managed to obtain Diprivan or another similar drug.

The phone call, from a minder of Jackson’s was very frantic, Lee said, and told her, “Michael needs to see you right away. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I could hear Michael in the background… ‘One side of my body is hot, it’s hot, and one side of my body it cold. It’s very cold.’

“I said, ‘Tell him he needs to go to the hospital,’” Lee recalls. “‘I don’t know what’s going, but he needs to go to the hospital… right away.’

“At that point I knew that somebody had given him something that hit the central nervous system. He was in trouble Sunday and was crying out.”

Jackson did not go to the hospital as Lee had instructed, and four days later, the singer had died from a suspected heart attack.

[Source]

Ledger’s Colleagues Speak About Actor’s Last Days

In the wake of pop superstar Michael Jackson’s death, professionals closest to the late Australian actor Heath Ledger have revealed how the star “battled with fame, a failed relationship and insomnia” in the days leading up to his tragic death in 2008.

Gerry Grennell, a vocals coach who worked and lived with Ledger during the filming of one of his last movies, The Dark Knight, has said that while the actor didn’t drink alcohol “once” during that period, the level of his sleeping pill consumption “was a concern.”

“I’d say: ‘If you can possibly bear it to stop taking the medications, do, because they don’t seem to be doing you any good’ – he agreed,” Grennell told Vanity Fair magazine.

“It is very difficult for me to imagine how close he came to not taking them.”

Ledger died in January of last year from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, including a host of sleeping medications, in his New York apartment at the age of 28.

Grennell believes that the sleeping medication – taken for the actor’s incurable insomnia – played a huge part in his shock death.

“[Ledger's death] was a combination of exhaustion, sleeping medication… and perhaps the after-effects of the flu,” the vocals coach said.

Nicola Pecorin, a cinematographer who worked with Ledger on the film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, admitted that the young actor had “dabbled” in narcotics but soon dropped the habit.

“He used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis,” she said, “like probably 50 per cent of Amercians [but Ledger] went clean as a whistle.”

Close friend and agent Steven Alexander said that around the time of his death, Ledger was quite concerned that his role in the “summer blockbuster” The Dark Knight would typecast him and turn him into a “matinee idol,” something the young star had never wanted to become.

“He wasn’t motivated by money or stardom but by the respect of his peers [and moviegoers],” Alexander explained.

“He was striving to become an ‘illusionist’ as he called it – able to create characters that weren’t there.”

[Source]