Bruce Dickinson opens up more about his illness and how it affected his voice

Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson recently discussed his 2014 throat cancer diagnosis, treatment, and eventual remission in an interview with Elizabeth Zharoff of the well-known YouTube channel The Charismatic Voice. This is what he said, as transcribed by blabbermouth.net.

The technical diagnosis for me was T3 N1 M0. That means that the tumor [in the throat] was ajudged to be a stage three tumor. And that’s just actually more or less how big it was. And the ‘N’ bit was whether or not there were any lymph nodes associated with it. N1 means there was one; I had cancer in a lymph node as well. And the M bit is, has it metastasized? In other words, spread to anywhere else in your body. And luckily, the answer to that was zero. People go, ‘Oh, you were lucky you caught it early. I went, ‘Well, I didn’t kind of catch it that early.’ It was three and a half centimeters. It was a golf ball living in the base of my tongue, and then there was a strawberry, a two-and-a-half-centimeter in the lymph node on the other side.

He recorded the whole album “The Book Of Souls” without difficoulties, though.

[Singing with the tumor] did not feel that different. That was the weirdest thing about it. Maybe it felt like there was maybe a slight restriction at the top end — a slight restriction —but that was all. But I knew there was something wrong in my body. My body was giving me other signals. People, [go], ‘Oh, were you losing weight?’ I went, ‘No, I was not losing weight.’ But I was getting these weird night sweats. And the thing that gave it away, and in truth, this is what gives it away for guys, because, of course, girls get this as well. In fact, the way to think about this… When I’m talking to people, they go, ‘Was it drinking and smoking [that caused the cancer]?’ I said, ‘No. Think of it this way: I had cervical cancer of the mouth.’ They went, ‘What? What do you mean? What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ ‘Oh my God. What are you, what? What have you been up to? I said, ‘I’ve been up to exactly the same thing that everybody else on the planet has been up to.’ So if you have this cancer, you’ve not done something wrong. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not a judgment from God. I asked my oncologist. I said, ‘Why do I have this cancer?’ I mean, I know what caused it — HPV16 [a high-risk type of Human Papillomavirus (HPV)], in my case. And he said, ‘Fair question.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t have this cancer.’ He said, ‘Look, you’re fit, you’re healthy. You do all the right things.’ He said, ‘It’s just not fair, is it?’ I said, ‘No, but why me?’ He said, ‘You know what?’ He goes, ‘It’s just called bad luck.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh.’ And you know what? When he said that, it made everything a lot easier to deal with because you weren’t looking for somebody to blame, you weren’t clutching at straws. Like, if there was somebody to blame, then maybe… No, no, no, no, no. It’s just called bad luck. Stuff happens. And at that point, I went, ‘Okay, I can deal with that.’ So there’s no point in feeling sorry for yourself. Step up to the plate, let’s get rid of it and let’s think beyond, if we do get rid of it.’ And my chances, in truth, were pretty good. I went, ‘Oh my God, stage three. The next one is stage four. And that’s like curtains.’ And he went, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Don’t even get hung up about that. He said, ‘Because every cancer is individual, and individual to an individual, but also every cancer is different in its prognosis.’ He said, ‘I’d much rather have stage three of your cancer than stage one of lung cancer.’ So I went, ‘Okay, got it. Right. So some cancers are worse to have than others.

The recovery process was long.

There was no surgery involved… But I had — and this is fairly standard treatment, I have to say — I had 33 sessions of radiation, like five sessions a week for six-something weeks. And the total they administered was two grays a day, which is a pretty thumping dose. I mean, I think 13 grays is a full-body lethal dose of radiation. So I had 66 grays over six and a bit weeks, all of it in my head and neck. So that’s a lot. That’s a lot. And at the same time, I had nine weeks of chemotherapy, of cisplatin, which was basically to make the radiation more effective against the cancer. That was the idea. So it was a three-week cycle; I turned up every three weeks and had sat there for a couple of hours and then left. And all of this was done outpatient. So I just turned up, got on the subway, had my radiation, went for a walk in the park. And things didn’t really start going weird for two or three weeks, and then you started getting fatigue and the inside of all — basically all the mucus membranes on the inside of my mouth fell off. Your tongue, you lost all sense of taste. Your tongue is stripped, so all the nerves were exposed. They wanted to put a feeding tube in. When I was diagnosed, the guy goes, ‘Come in, I’ll just pop a little feeding tube in.’ I went, ‘No. You’re not.’ I said, ‘I’ll feed myself.’ He goes, ‘Most people find it very difficult to feed themselves after about four or five weeks.’ I went, ‘I will feed myself. If I can’t, you can come and put a tube up my nose,’ I said, ‘but I’m gonna feed myself.’ ‘Cause I didn’t want people cutting a hole in me, and I didn’t want to be in hospital. Because if you’re in hospital, you are already half dead — my version of things. And so I was, like, ‘I will do this. In spite of everything, I’m gonna do this on my own.’ And he quite liked the combative approach. He was, like, ‘Look, 50% of your recovery is mental.’

He also revealed how he got this alarming diagnosis.

The first person I went to see was like a regular doctor. And I said, ‘Look, I think I have this thing. I have a lump in my neck.’ Most guys find out they have head and neck cancer because they have a lump in their neck that won’t go away. It might not be the original sign of the cancer, but it might be a lymph node that’s hard and raised. It doesn’t go away and doesn’t turn into flu. And it can be misdiagnosed as, ‘Oh, you’ve got an abscess,’ or ‘you’ve got a cyst,’ or ‘you’ve got something’. And I know a couple of guys that has happened to, and they’ve survived, but it took them three doctors and one of them actually had an operation by mistake. And nobody caught the fact that they actually had throat cancer. Which is scary, but there you are. So do not be afraid of going and saying, ‘I think I might have this’. And you can find out in a second. I mean, I had an ultrasound for this lump in the side of my neck, and the doctor was going, he said, ‘Hmm, yeah, yeah, you definitely got a lump there. The question is why.’ And I went, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘How are you with needles?’ I went. ‘Uh, you know.’ He said, ‘I’m just gonna stick a little needle in and just take a little bit out and have a look at it.’ And wow, there you go. Bingo. Three, four days later, I got a phone call: ‘You need to come straight away. We found X, Y, Z.’ And I went, ‘Okay, that’s cancer.’ And they could tell straight away. So then I’m in front of the ear, nose and throat specialist. And she has a look and she has a look and says, ‘Yeah, I think I can see where the tumor is on your base of your tongue.’ And so, here you go. And now — boom. And now next thing, you are in front of the oncologist and he said, ‘I’m gonna get rid of this for you.’ I went, ‘Wow. I like the sound of that.’ He said, ‘I’ll get rid of it for you and you won’t come back.’ And then he said, ‘Do you smoke?’ I went, ‘Uh, no.’ And he said, ‘Have you ever smoked?’ I went, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, when I was like, 18, 19, I had a couple of joints ’cause I was in the band and stuff.’ He goes, ‘No, actual [smoking].’ I went, ‘No, never.’ They went, ‘Okay, that’s great.’ I said, ‘Well, how much difference does that make?’ He said, ‘Well, whatever the probability of me getting rid of it now, it means it’s 20% better if you don’t smoke and it means it’s 20% less likely it’ll come back.’ That’s huge. I said, ‘Wow.’ I said, ‘That’s enormous.’ I said, ‘So, let me guess, people, they quit smoking when they find out they’ve got cancer.’ He went, ‘Nope.’ He said they’ll be sat outside the radiation machine having a cigarette before they go in for their treatment. I went, ‘That is so messed up.’ But that’s the addiction of it. It shows how powerful the addiction is. But anyway, so, I had all the radiation, and I asked him how long before my body is back, let alone my voice, but my body. And I had the start of the treatment in January that lasted about six weeks. So by the time we got to the end of February, the treatment was done. The radiation continues to work for a while and they can’t do a scan to figure out if you’ve nailed everything until May because, as he explained to me, all they’d do if they did that was they just get a load of like radioactive hotspots. I was not radioactive, but I’ve been… Put some food in the microwave, nd then nuke it to death. Pull it out and you realize that it gets hotter after you pull it out ’cause you’ve put a load of energy into the food and it will continue to get hotter. That’s what’s going on with your head, except it’s not microwave energy; it’s next notch up. And so the radiation will continue to basically cook the inside of your head for a few weeks and then gradually diminish. Then they can take a picture and find out if it’s gone. But notwithstanding that, I said, ‘How long from when I start till I’m…’ He said, ‘Well,’ he goes, ‘for example, I had a Royal Air Force fighter pilot who had the same cancer as you sitting in that chair.’ And he said ‘it was about a year before I saw him properly back and he was back in an airplane again and doing all his stuff.’ I went, ‘A year, huh?’ He went, ‘Yeah.’ I went, ‘Right, I’ll beat that.’ And then in my mind I was, like, ‘I’m gonna beat him. I’m gonna beat an RAF fighter pilot and do it better. I’m gonna go faster than him.’ And so it was around 10 months, something like that, and it wasn’t as easy as I thought it was gonna be. Well, I didn’t think it was gonna be easy, but in my head, I was, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’ll be done in five minutes.’ I lost not as much weight as some people did, but I lost about 12 pounds. No — a bit more, a bit more than 12 pounds. 12-15 pounds and dropped 15 pounds in weight, which is good ’cause I was kind of porky when I went in. I fed myself up: ‘I’m gonna eat like a pig at Christmas, because I’m gonna lose weight.’ But I know some people that have a really bad reaction and they dropped like 50, 60 pounds in weight. And people react just differently.

Dickinson also tried some experimental methods to heal, like a naturopathic practitioner.

I said to him, ‘Okay, I’ve got throat cancer. I’m gonna go and have all this radiation and chemo.’ And I expected him to turn around and go, ‘Oh, you don’t wanna do that. Let’s do something alternative with wheat grass or something.’ And luckily, he is a sensible chap, and he turned around and he said, ‘Yep. That’s what you’ve gotta do. That’ll get rid of it.’ I went, ‘So there’s there’s nothing else I can do.’ He said, ‘Nope.’ I went, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘However, I think we might be able to beef up some aspects of your immune system so that you recover faster and you try and do less harm to the rest of your body during the treatment.’ So he prescribed me a whole bunch of mushroom pills and this thing and that and stuff, and I took all of it to my oncologist and said, ‘Hey, listen, I’m thinking of doing this alongside your treatment.’ And he looked at it and he went, ‘Yeah. Cool.’ And I said, ‘Is there anything on there?’ He said, ‘The only thing’ — and this is not a joke — he said, ‘The only thing is you must not have any heavy metals in there. And it sounds like the world’s most awful pun. And I was just, like, ‘You are joking.’ He said, ‘No, I’m not joking.’ He said, ‘So, iron supplements, chromium, copper, all this kind of stuff, it’s a no-no,’ he said, ‘because that will really mess with the radiation effectiveness against the cancer.’ I went, ‘Okay, we’re not gonna do any of that stuff.’ Mushrooms, though, is okay. So, I did a bunch of research about all that stuff. And yeah, I just did kind of regular exercise and walked around like nothing was happening. And then things did start to happen. And I tried to do some singing about, I guess, probably about four or five months after the cancer treatment, and it was scary how awful it was. I asked the ear, nose and throat doc, I said, ‘How long before I could try singing?’ And she said probably — this was in December, and she said, ‘Well, if you have the treatment and you’re done by February and it’s all good, maybe you could think about the end of November to start singing.’ And I was, like, ‘Mmmm, okay.’ So, I had to consider the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to sing again in the way that I do. And I was comfortable with that. I was resigned with that, because if there was some physical reason why I couldn’t sing the way I do normally, there’s nothing you can do about that. If things have been changed irreversibly, you have to learn to do something differently. You have to sing a different way. It doesn’t mean you cannot sing, but it means you have to be able to sing a different way. And that’s when the thought formed, what do I actually do in my life? Am I just a human noise generator, or am I actually telling stories? And that’s when I went, ‘Actually, you know what? No matter what happens, I can still tell stories.’

It seemed like it wasn’t a big deal for him to lose his voice.

Everybody has a voice in the world. Everybody has a voice. And I tell people this when they say I can’t sing. I said, yes, you can. You might not be able to sing like me, but when you tell your story with your voice, it’s unique to you, and nobody else can tell your story, and that’s authentic. Leonard Cohen does not have any kind of classical voice whatsoever, but my God, what a great storyteller with his voice. Johnny Cash — a great voice but not Pavarotti. It’s the unique character of people’s voices that enables them to tell the stories. And so I developed my style and it tells stories. But if I didn’t have my style anymore, I’d develop another style in order to tell stories. I wasn’t going there. I was thinking, that’s my backstop. Let’s just see what happens and wait. I’m the world’s most impatient man, and I tried to sing after about six months, and I was shocked how awful it sounded,” he continued. “It sounded like a wounded buffalo. It just made this — what is it, ‘Young Frankenstein’? When the monster comes out and they’re doing ‘Puttin’ On The Ritz’, and he goes, ‘Ritz.’ And that was me. And I was just, like, ‘Oh my God.’ And I was in the bathroom doing it. I was just, ‘Just stop. It’s been five months. They said 10 months. Wait.’ And then gradually my body started to recover, and I got energy back and I started putting on a little bit of weight. So one day I was just walking around the house, and I was feeling all right. So I went, [starts singing a few notes. It didn’t hurt. And then it was there. And then I just thought, ‘I wonder if I could do a little bit of ‘Run To The Hills’.’ And I did. And I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s there. Oh my God.’ And that was, like, I’m thinking, probably the end of September, October. And I thought, ‘It’s there.’ And then I went, ‘Right. You know it’s there. So leave it alone. Put it back in its box ’cause you know it’s going to be all right. And the longer you leave it, the more all right it will be when you want to go balls out and start pushing it.’