Earlier this year, Megadeth guitarist and hard rock hero Dave Mustaine announced he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer. The diagnosis forced Mustaine to cancel all of his planned performances and engagements scheduled throughout the rest of the year. Mustaine shared an update on the progress of his treatment and how he’s managed the illness thus far in a profile piece published by Rolling Stone late last week.
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“I’m on the other side of the majority of the treatment, and I feel really strong,” Mustaine admits in the piece, which reports the 58-year-old completed his final round of treatment back in the fall. “After the radiation, the guy said all of my test results looked amazing. ‘You look like you’re in stage 1 and you’re supposed to be in stage 3 right now.’ And then the oncologist said the same thing: ‘You look really strong.’ So we kept moving through the process.”
The report goes on to state that Mustaine is not yet officially in remission, but has finished all necessary treatments up to this point and has started rehabilitation.
“I went, ‘Fuck.’ And I thought, ‘OK, Mustaine. You can do this.’ And we commenced kicking this thing’s ass,” the guitarist continued when talking about his initial thought process following the diagnosis. “I thought about every single trick that I had learned about healing my body and the things I’d learned from martial arts, and I did everything that the doctor said to a T, and hopefully this is the end of it and I never hear of it again. But I feel great … My family, especially my wife, is such a rock to lean on. It’s the greatest thing. If I have something that’s going wrong with me, I can turn to my family.”
Fans can read the entire interview here.