And Ronnie Wood believes it’s nothing short of a miracle that he’s been now given a clean bill of health following his battle with cancer.
“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,” he revealed in an interview with the UK edition of the Sunday Mail yesterday
“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.”
Ironically, Ronnie had only given up smoking shortly before doctors told him he had lung cancer. He had packed it in only a mere week before his one-year-old twin daughters came into the world. “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?’”
When he was told that it was lung cancer, Ronnie said he was prepared to die rather than endure the hell of chemo. “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.”
But thankfully he was told by doctors that he didn’t need to have chemo. “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.’”
It was a battle he won. ““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.”
After decades of hard partying, Wood says his “only vice” these days is a can of fizzy Cola.