Ronnie Wood has a cancer scare

If you don't know the name Ronnie Wood, no matter. He's a guitar player, formerly of The Faces but now The Rolling Stones. He's recently had a major cancer scare.

Back in May, it was discovered that a cancerous lesion was found on the lung of former Faces but current Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. He had the piece of his lung with the cancer in it removed for safety. He was lucky that the cancer was detected early and that no chemotherapy treatments were required. He still worried that if it wasn't discovered, he might not survive.

"There was a week when everything hung in the balance and it could have been curtains – time to say goodbye,” he told Event. “You never know what is going to happen"

It was discovered during a mandatory physical in preparation for next month's European tour. He says what followed that discovery "a week of tests. They needed to know if it had set up encampments and spread to my lymph nodes. If that had happened it would have been all over for me. … I was prepared for bad news but I also had faith it would be OK. Apart from the doctors, we didn’t tell anyone because we didn’t want to put anyone else though the hell we were going through. But 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 said that one particular reason for not wanting to go through chemo was "I wasn’t going to lose my hair. This hair wasn’t going anywhere."

He says that even he is not shocked that it was discovered. The last time he had a chest X-ray was in 2002 in rehab and years of smoking cigarettes, which he had quit a year before the birth of his twin daughters.

"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?" He credits his wife, Sally Humphries, for helping him through

Later on, he said "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."