Ronnie Wood is thankful he didn’t have to endure the pain of chemotherapy.
The 72-year-old guitarist was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017 and feels "lucky" that laser treatment not only got rid of the tumour, it also cured his emphysema and meant he didn’t have to undergo the gruelling drug treatment to remove all traces of the disease from his body.
Asked if it was true he’d turned down chemotherapy because he was concerned about the side-effect of hair loss, he told MOJO magazine: "I would have done. Not because of the barnet but because I’ve seen the pain people go through on it.
"But I was lucky that cancer wasn’t in the rest of my body – they were able to burn it out.
"As I say, somebody up there likes me… and somebody down there must like me too."
Ronnie previously admitted he "let go immediately" when he received his diagnosis and never feared for his future.
Asked if he was afraid, he said: "I let go immediately. I knew it was going to be there, because I smoked for England for 54 years. It was, ‘God, of course I’ve got cancer of the lung. But I haven’t got it anywhere else.’ I knew I was strong enough not to let it be anywhere else in my body."
Ronnie’s lung cancer was found during a routine medical with the band’s doctor, Richard Dawood.
He previously 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. [Dr Dawood] 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 I said: ‘Just get it out of me.’"
Ronnie Wood grateful to avoid chemo
