This is stand-up star Robert Schimmel's edgy, hilarious and poignant musings on his personal battle with cancer.In the Spring of 2000, Robert Schimmel was riding high. He'd won been voted the Stand-Up of the Year at the American Comedy Awards, his HBO TV show Unprotected was a huge hit, and his sitcom Schimmel had been picked up by Fox and was slated for later in the year in the slot following The Simpsons.And then it all came crashing down. Diagnosed with stage three non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, he was told he would have to undergo an aggressive and immediate course of chemotherapy. The sitcom was put on hiatus (i.e. dumped) and the fire of his white-hot career started to go out.But Schimmel never lost his sense of humour, his knife-edge, and most of all, his passion to entertain. Indeed, it was his basic need to laugh - even if the only people around him were suffering from cancer, and the room he was playing to was the other patients at the clinic during chemo sessions - that carried him through his ordeal. From his colourful banter with nurses to his hilarious conversation with a wig salesman, going for the laugh was Robert Schimmel's survival mechanism. Luckily for the readers of this book, he took notes.Alternately laugh-out-loud funny and poignant, Cancer on Five Dollars A Day shares what Schimmel experienced and what he learned during treatment.