Vivian Campbell has revealed that his Hodgkin's lymphoma has returned, thirteen years after his original diagnosis and roughly a year after he announced he was completely in remission.
Speaking to Francisco Sigüenza of El Salvador's Radio YSKL FM, the guitarist — known to metal audiences for the DIO run that produced "Holy Diver", "The Last In Line" and "Sacred Heart", and still leading LAST IN LINE — described the one moment the disease genuinely frightened him.
"There's only been one time that I felt it was gonna kill me," he said. "In the winter of 2023, I got really scared about what was happening and the pace at which it was happening. And I realized at that point that I had to do a donor transplant. It was my only hope to survive. And that's what I did. I did that in January of '25. I did a donor transplant. Unfortunately, it didn't stick. So the cancer has returned. And I'm continuing treatments to manage it. I'll probably have to do another transplant within a few years with another donor to try and see if maybe that would cure me."
The January 2025 procedure had appeared to work: a PET scan that April came back clean, and in June 2025 Campbell said he was in remission for the first time in twelve or thirteen years, after what he called going "through the mill with all sorts of chemo and immunotherapy and combination therapies", including an earlier stem cell transplant using his own cells that failed.
He is refusing to let the news reorganise his life. "In the meantime, I'm certainly not slowing down. I'm doing as much with my life as possible," he said, listing not only music but rally driving, a childhood ambition he has finally taken up. "As a child, I thought, 'If I don't play guitar for a living, I'm gonna be a race car driver.' So, I'm very, very, very fortunate and blessed that I get to do both."
Work, he argues, is what carried him through the worst of the treatment. "The fact that I could still continue to work, that gives me something to live for, something that you enjoy, that you're passionate about, that you can wake up in the morning and look forward to. I think that deflects, that takes away from focusing too much on cancer." He has met people who did the opposite: "They think, 'Oh, I can't do anything. I need to stay in bed.' I've never felt that way."
His message to anyone facing the same words from a doctor was blunt. "Fear is inevitable when you're first told those words. But once you get over that, you gotta realize just how to manage it and how to deal with it as best as possible, and just don't give in."
Campbell, now 63, went public with his diagnosis in June 2013.
Source: blabbermouth.net