Rolling Stones Guitarist Ronnie Wood Opens up About His Battle With Lung Cancer

He's lucky that he gets to keep rolling on! Ronnie Wood, guitarist for the iconic rock 'n' roll band The Rolling Stones, just revealed that he experienced a health scare during his short battle with lung cancer and he is fortunate enough to have successfully beat the disease.

Ronnie, 70, revealed that he was first diagnosed during a routine medical checkup with his doctor three months ago. He had been a smoker for most of his adult life, but he quit one week before the birth of his youngest children — one-year-old twin daughters Gracie and Alice — back in 2016 so his doctor wanted to give him a "deeper" exam to check his lungs.

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Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Charlie Watts at the 2016 North American debut of Exhibitionism at Industria in New York City

"I said 'go for it,’" Ronnie recalled in an interview with The Mail on Sunday’s Event Magazine. "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.'"

But even though Ronnie was very adamant about quickly removing cancer from his lungs, he knew that he didn't want to undergo chemotherapy treatments in order to do so mostly because he was afraid of losing his hair. Instead, he underwent a week of tests to see if the cancer had spread anywhere else. After the results revealed that it hadn't, Ronnie was prepared to undergo a five-hour surgery in order to remove cancer from part of his lung.

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"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,'" he said. "Just before I closed my eyes for the operation, I looked at the doctor and said, 'Let battle commence.'"

Even though Ronnie described that week as one of the darkest weeks of his life, he praised his 39-year-old wife for standing by his side. "Sally was amazing," he gushed. "It’s only since we’ve got through it that she has been able to tell me how it was the worst seven days of her life."