Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood talks about scary lung cancer diagnosis

Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood reveals he thought he was given a death sentence when he was diagnosed with cancer three months ago.

"I’ve had a fight with a touch of lung cancer," says Wood, in an interview with The 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."

But, Wood's doctors appear to have caught the cancer early.

The 70-year-old musician explains that at a routine appointment before a tour, he was informed that he had a cancerous lesion, a "supernova burning away on my left lung," as he called it. Wood told his doctor, “Just get it out of me.” 

Though Wood's disease didn't wind up spreading, he had decided to skip chemo if it did because "I wasn’t going to use that bayonet in my body (and) this hair wasn't going anywhere." A week after Wood's diagnosis, he underwent a five-hour operation that removed  part of his lung.

"I’m OK now. But I’m going to have a check-up every three months. They caught it early," Wood says in the interview. The longtime chain-smoker, who quit the habit before 1-year-old twin daughters Gracie and Alice were born in May 2016, adds, "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."