IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson says that he “can pretty much do anything” on his new titanium hip following his surgery late last year.
The 63-year-old musician, who also previously revealed that he suffered an Achilles tendon rupture, discussed his recent health issues in a new interview with Revolver.
Asked how his Achilles is feeling these days, Dickinson said: “Ha! The Achilles is fine. At the end of April [2019], just about 10 days before I finished all the vocals [for the upcoming MAIDEN album ‘Senjutsu’], I was fencing and all of a sudden it just felt like someone had given me an electric shock in the back of my right leg. I was on the floor, and I looked at my leg and my foot was kind of not really connected to the rest of my leg. I was, like, ‘Well, that’s kind of weird.’ [Laughs] Thirty-six hours later, they stitched it back together in the morning, and I walked out in the afternoon on the boot, which I wore while doing the rest of my vocals. And then after I did the tour, I was still doing rehab on my calf, and all of a sudden, my opposite hip was really hurting, ‘Everybody said, ‘Oh, that’s because you were compensating for your Achilles, and yada yada yada,’ but when I went to the hip doctor and told him, ‘Hey look, this is really bugging me,’ he went, ‘Ah yes — that’s because you’ve got no cartilage left.’ I said, ‘Do I need a new hip?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you will do.’ So I did two or three more months like that and said, ‘Can we just swap it out?’ Because we were all on lockdown, and it wasn’t like I had anything else to do for the next two or three months. So last October, I had five and a half inches of titanium hammered into my femur, and now I’m back fencing, training, doing everything. My physio says I can pretty much do anything on it, so I am really looking forward to getting back to the States as soon as I possibly can, and then you can see me leaping from tree to tree and monitor to monitor.”
Six years ago, Dickinson had surgery to remove a cancerous lump on his throat. The rocker, who had a golf gall-size tumor on his tongue and another in the lymph node on the right side of his neck, got the all-clear in May 2015 after radiation and nine weeks of chemotherapy.
Bruce previously told iNews that he wanted to cover his cancer battle in his 2017 autobiography, “What Does This Button Do?”, to raise awareness of the condition, which affects people who often have no or minimal history of tobacco or alcohol abuse. The individuals with HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer who undergo treatment have a disease-free survival rate of 85 to 90 percent over five years.
Dickinson also expressed disdain for some of the media outlets that suggested he may have gotten tongue cancer from performing oral sex on women.
IRON MAIDEN‘s 17th studio album, “Senjutsu”, will be released on September 3 via BMG. The band’s first LP in six years was recorded in 2019 in Paris with longstanding producer Kevin Shirley and co-produced by bassist Steve Harris.
