Ronnie Wood Had Lung Cancer

New father Ronnie Wood, 70, recently revealed that he battled lung cancer. Here's what he had to say, as reprinted by the Daily Mail:

‘Did I think I’d ever make it to see this? Hell no! Someone up there must like me. And luckily someone down here likes me too. I’ve had a fight with a touch of lung cancer. There was a week when everything hung in the balance and it could have been curtains – time to say goodbye. You never know what is going to happen.

I had this thought at the back of my mind after I gave up smoking a year ago: “How can I have got through 50 years of chain-smoking – and all the rest of my bad habits – without something going on in there?” So I went along to see our good old doctor, Richard Dawood, because we [Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts] all have to be checked before we go on tour, and he asked me if I wanted him to go deeper and check my heart, lungs and blood. I said, “Go for it.”

And then he came back with the news that I had this supernova burning away on my left lung. And, to be totally honest, I wasn’t surprised. I knew I hadn’t had a chest X-ray since I went into Cottonwood [a rehab clinic in Tucson, Arizona] in 2002. He asked me what I wanted to do and my answer was simple: “Just get it out of me.” 

But then there was a week of tests. They needed to know if it had set up encampments and spread to my lymph nodes. If that had happened it would have been all over for me. 
‘So there was this one week when I didn’t know what was happening. Sally [Humphreys, his wife of five years] was amazing. It’s only since we’ve got through it that she has been able to tell me how it was the worst seven days of her life. 

I was prepared for bad news but I also had faith it would be OK. Apart from the doctors, we didn’t tell anyone because we didn’t want to put anyone else though the hell we were going through. But I made up my mind that if it had spread I wasn’t going to go through chemo, I wasn’t going to use that bayonet in my body.

I’m OK now. But I’m going to have a check-up every three months. They caught it early. People have to get checked. Seriously have to get checked. I was bloody lucky but then I’ve always had a very strong guardian angel looking out for me. By rights I shouldn’t be here.’