BLACK SABBATH’s Tony Iommi Issues Health Update - “The Surgeon Told Me He Doesn’t Expect The Cancer To Go Away”
January 7, 2015, 9 years ago
Black Sabbath guitar legend Tony Iommi has spoken with the UK’s Mirror Online about his battle with blood cancer lymphoma, which was diagnosed in January 2012.
“When the doctors told me I had cancer I thought, ‘That’s it then’,” Iommi says. “Cancer was death as far as I was concerned. I found a painful lump in my groin while I was in New York promoting my book. I thought it was my prostate acting up again, but Ozzy told me I should get it checked out. I came back to England and had an operation to reduce my prostate. It was painless but afterwards I needed a catheter. When that came out I went to see the surgeon. He said: ‘Good news on the prostate. It’s been cut down to a sensible size and everything is good there. But on the lump we took out, we found follicular lymphoma.’ It’s a type of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”
Despite the illness, Black Sabbath toured the globe in 2013 and 2014 in support of the well-received 13 album.
“I finally finished my antibody treatment over the summer,” Iommi adds. “It’s good in a way because I have more energy now, but I still don’t know whether the treatment worked. The surgeon told me he doesn’t expect the cancer to go away. There’s a 30 per cent chance that it could, but more than likely it will come back and it could be any time. I look at life differently now. I could be here another ten years or just one year – I don’t know.”Read more at the Mirror Online.
