He put the first bout with the relentless illness down to smoking, where he admitted he consumed “25 to 30 cigarettes a day for 50-odd years” before quitting the habit in 2016.
“There was a week when everything hung in the balance and it could have been curtains,” he said, remembering one time he thought he was going to die.
He was given the all-clear in 2018, after undergoing a five-hour operation to have part of his lung removed.
Ronnie referenced the operation in his 2019 documentary Somebody Up There Likes Me, saying: “They went, ‘Your lungs now are like you’d never smoked’ and I went, ‘How is that for a get out of jail free card?’”
