US Sen. Frank Lautenberg of NJ says he’s cancer-free after lymphoma diagnosis in February

US Sen. Lautenberg of NJ says he’s cancer-free

TRENTON, N.J. — Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who became the Senate’s oldest member at age 86 when fellow Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia died Monday, has announced that he is cancer-free.

Lautenberg made the announcement Saturday at the Garden State Equality Legends Dinner in Maplewood. He told the gay rights group that his doctor said to him Friday: “It’s gone, Frank.”

Lautenberg was hospitalized Feb. 15 after falling at his New Jersey home. He was treated for a bleeding ulcer, and it was announced Feb. 19 that B-cell lymphoma was found in his stomach.

Lautenberg began chemotherapy treatment and returned to the Senate on March 2.

“I’ve gone to work just about every day since the first bout in the hospital came along,” Lautenberg said at the dinner.

The 92-year-old Byrd had been in frail health for several years.

The liberal Lautenberg became prominent as a founder of the payroll services company Automatic Data Processing long before he entered politics in 1982 with a successful run for the U.S. Senate.

He served three terms before retiring from politics in 2000, but returned two years later as a last-minute replacement in a Senate race when Sen. Robert Torricelli dropped out. He was re-elected in 2008, winning easily in a race in which his age never materialized as a major issue.

Lautenberg is a major supporter of gun control and sponsored a 1996 law banning gun ownership by those convicted of domestic violence. He’s also a critic of the tobacco industry; he wrote the law than banned smoking on domestic airline flights.

He’s been active in transportation issues — he criticized the Transportation Security Administration over a disruptive security breach at Newark Liberty International Airport in January — and played a key role in passage of a 1984 law that used federal highway funds as leverage to pressure all states to adopt a minimum drinking age of 21.

But much of the news he’s made in recent years has had nothing to do with policy or politics. It was revealed in 2009 that his family’s foundation had lost more than $7 million in the $50 billion investment scam run by financier Bernard Madoff.

Lymphoma is an immune system cancer, and the B-cell form is a type of the non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that strikes more than 65,000 people in the U.S. annually. There are multiple subtypes of the B-cell form, with widely varying treatments and prognoses. Lymphomas can strike in lymph tissue anywhere in the body, such as the lymph nodes — and the stomach contains lymphoid tissue.