Doug Aldrich gave an update on his health nearly five months after having surgery for his throat cancer in a recent chat with Radio Bypass.
When asked if he was cancer-free now, Doug replied, “I don’t know if I’m clear. I guess it takes five or seven years before you’re actually clear, but the doctors — the surgery was really good. Everything was positive, and they fried me really good for six weeks, so I’m pretty sure everything else that was left over is gone. But I got some blood work done last week. We’ll see what that says. And then I’ve got to get a PET scan, and that’s a full body scan again to determine if everything’s good.”
He added about any possible vocal cord damge, “No. I think I sound pretty similar to what I did. It was on my tonsil. So they removed my tonsil on one side and then the lymph nodes on the inside of my neck — they took 30 lymph nodes. But, yeah, my voice sounds pretty similar and I can sing — not that I do a lot of singing with The Dead Daisies, but I can do it.”
Aldrich is set to hit the road with The Dead Daisies next month. He had to sit out the band’s recent European tour due to surgery, with Reb Beach stepping in as his temporary replacement.
In September 2024, Doug’s wife, Daniela ‘Danni’ Aldrich, shared that his surgery took five hours and involved multiple steps. She said everything went really well and praised the guitarist for his determination. She also mentioned that a nurse called him a superhero for handling it so well.
Doug was with Dio for a few years from 2002 to 2006 and played in Whitesnake from 2002 until 2014 before joining the Daisies. He appeared on two of the latter’s studio albums, ‘Good To Be Bad’ (2008) and ‘Forevermore’ (2011), as well as live releases like ‘Made In Japan’ and ‘Made In Britain/The World Records’ in 2013. He left Whitesnake to spend more time with his family.
