Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood has revealed that the surgery he underwent in May was to remove a small cancerous lesion from his lungs.
“I’ve had a fight with a touch of lung cancer,” Wood tells The Daily Mail. “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.”
The cancer was discovered in May as Wood underwent a routine physical ahead of the band’s upcoming European tour.
“[The Doctor] came back with the news that I had this supernova burning away on my left lung,” explained the rocker. “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.”
“I was prepared for bad news,” he continued, “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."
Clean and sober for eight years now, Wood – who became a father to twin girls just two days before his 69th birthday last year – underwent a five-hour surgery to remove part of his lung and has successfully come out the other side with one eye firmly on his health.
“I’m OK now. But I’m going to have a check-up every three months,” he says. “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.”
Wood and The Rolling Stones have been working on a new album of original material, their first since 2005’s “A Bigger Bang.”
The band will launch the month-long No Filter European tour at the Stadtpark in Hamburg, Germany on September 9.
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