Rod Stewart

Cancer Type – Thyroid

Bio – Rod Stewart – Thyroid Cancer almost claimed this musician’s voice, forcing him to contemplate what he would do next, landscape design?

Short Story – At 55, Rod Stewart found himself in midst of the hardest journey in his career. He had cancer removed from his Thyroid, taking weeks for even a scratch in his voice to come back. Not ready to be done performing, the singer felt self-conscious sitting at the piano next to voice coach, Nate Lamb, working on vocal exercises to regain his muscles.

He called his band to rehearse, and could only manage the opening line. When the press received word Rod was fighting cancer, Rod’s response, “There was no fight, of course; no battle, no brave struggle. I wish I could pretend there was, but that would be an insult to people who really have fought, battled and struggled. In my case, the cancer was there, and then a couple of days later it was gone.”

For Rod, the cancer was not the fight. The fight was to get his voice back. One line of a song, went to a pair of lines, which soon led to an entire song, and then two. After a few weeks, he managed to regain the strength for a full show and keep his career.

No matter how small your brush with cancer was Rod, you are an example of working for something you love and want in your life.

Image Credits – By Helge Øverås (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons