In May, Ronnie Wood went in for a routine check-up before departing on a Rolling Stones tour and learned that he had lung cancer. "Just get it out of me," Wood told the doctor.
Before the tests and operations, however, the 70-year-old Wood made a decision: "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 told The Daily Mail, though not because he thought it would be a wasted effort. "It's more I wasn't going to lose my hair. This hair wasn't going anywhere. I said, 'No way.' And I just kept the faith it would be all right."
The cancer hadn't spread to his lymph nodes, and, during a five-hour operation, the doctors were able to remove it, but not until after a torturous period of waiting for results with his family. "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," Wood said.
It was all right—they found the cancer early enough to get it out, and Wood is debuting his new art book, Ronnie Wood: Artist, and hitting a 14-stop European tour with the Stones. Speaking of the Stones, it's that infamous lifestyle, the hard partying and harder drugs, that made Wood expect the worst. "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?" he said.
Wood's calmed down in the past few years: He married again, quit smoking, quit drinking, and had twin daughters. He is a self-proclaimed "rock geezer" who had committed himself to his visual art. His only remaining vice, after years of cocaine and heroin and nicotine, is Coke from the can. And he considers himself lucky. "People have to get checked. Seriously have to get checked," he said. "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."
