Dr Feelgood guitarist and Game of Thrones star Wilko Johnson has revealed that after revolutionary surgery he is now cancer free.
The 67-year-old musician was given months to live in January 2013 and told BBC News of his radical surgery in May to remove the tumour: "It was an 11-hour operation. This tumour weighed 3kg - that's the size of a baby. Anyway, they got it all. They cured me."
Johnson, who played mute executioner Ilyn Payne in the first and second season of Game of Thrones, said that when he was given his prognosis, he came to terms with accepting his death: "I decided that was the way to deal with it - not to curse it or fight it or anything like that. Just try and enjoy the time left, which I'd done.
"In order to do that, you have to accept, yes you're going to die, which in itself was quite an experience because it gives you a whole different way of looking at things."
He continued: "And then for someone to come up and say, 'We can fix it' . . . When they first said they could operate, I was thinking, 'What are they saying? They may be offering me two or three more months' life?'
"But no, they weren't, they were saying they could get rid of the tumour, and that's what they did. And it's gone. And I don't have cancer."
He concluded: "It's so weird and so strange that it's kind of hard to come to terms with it in my mind. Now, I'm spending my time gradually coming to terms with the idea that my death is not imminent, that I am going to live on."
