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Rolling Stone member Ronnie Wood has revealed his secret three-month-long battle with lung cancer.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail On Sunday, the 70-year-old – who is married to his 39-year-old third wife, Sally – said he had been prepared ‘to say goodbye’ to his young family after getting the devastating diagnosis.
The father-of-six said: ‘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,’ he confessed to the publication.
The star – who quit smoking a week before his one-year-old twins Gracie and Alice were born – was diagnosed three months ago during a routine medical with the band’s doctor Richard Dawood. On this occasion, Dawood asked Wood if he could ‘go deeper’ and check the star’s heart, lungs and blood.
‘I said go for it,’ recalled Wood. ‘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.” ’
However, despite the magnitude of the diagnosis, woods insisted that he wouldn’t undergo chemotherapy as he didn’t want to lose his hair.
‘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 through 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.’
He added: ‘It’s more I wasn’t going to lose my hair. This hair wasn’t going anywhere. A week later they came back with the news that it hadn’t spread and I said, “Let’s get it out now.” Just before I closed my eyes for the operation, I looked at the doctor and said, “Let battle commence.” ’
Thankfully, the cancer has been removed successfully.
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