Conservative radio titan Rush Limbaugh announced to his listeners Monday that his lung cancer is terminal.

Recent scans showed that the cancer has progressed despite much treatment and positive results. “It’s not dramatic, but it is in the wrong direction,” said Limbaugh.

Limbaugh announced his cancer diagnosis back in February. President Donald Trump honored the pioneering conservative talk show host with the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address shortly thereafter.

Here’s a transcript of what Rush said on his show Monday. Excerpt below:

From the moment you get the diagnosis, there’s a part of you every day, okay, that’s it. Life’s over. You just don’t know when. But when you get that diagnosis, I mean, that’s… So, during the period of time after the diagnosis, you do what you can to prolong life, do what you can to prolong a happy life. You measure a happy life against whatever medication it takes.

And at some point you can decide, you know, this medication may be working, but I hate the way I feel every day. I’m not there yet. But it is part and parcel of this. It’s tough to realize that the days where I do not think I’m under a death sentence are over. Now, we all are, is the point. We all know that we’re going to die at some point, but when you have a terminal disease diagnosis that has a time frame to it, then that puts a different psychological and even physical awareness to it.

[…]

Stage 1 is just a bunch of little nodules running around, and even if you got a scan that showed a bunch of nodules, they’d say, “Gotta keep a sharp eye on them. There’s some nodules here, some nodules there.” But it really doesn’t present as what it is (this type of cancer) until it’s stage 4 — and stage 4 is, as they say, terminal. So we have some recent progression. It’s not dramatic, but it is the wrong direction.

So we have to tweak the treatment plan, which we did, and the chemotherapy drugs in hopes of keeping additional progression at bay for as long as possible. The idea now is to keep it where it is or maybe have it reduce again. We’ve shown that that is possible. If it happened once, it can happen again. So that’s the objective of the current treatment plan.

We here at Big League Politics will continue to keep Rush and his family in our thoughts and prayers.