Def Leppard's guitarist, Vivian Campbell, will undergo his scheduled stem cell transplant to hopefully rid himself of his lymphoma once and for all.
Campbell originally announced he had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in June of 2013 and went through agressive treatment to battle the disease. In November, he said he was cancer free by the disease flared up again in May of this year.
Treatment was able to bring it under control again in about three months but it was obvious that an even more aggressive course of action was needed so plans were put in place to use stem cell therapy after Def Leppard was done with their current tour.
According to an interview with band member Joe Elliott in Billboard, Campbell is now in the hospital and waiting for the harvested stem cells to be put back into his body. Elliott details the current situation:
The latest that I’m aware of with Viv, they were harvesting stem cells from him and do whatever they do in a Petri dish with them, and then they were gonna carpet bomb him with chemo for a week and he was gonna be kept in the hospital…Then they’re gonna put the stem cells back in and do whatever they do, wave the magic wand and say ‘Abracadabra’…We were under the impression he would be in the hospital until Christmas, but the last email he sent me, which was about two weeks ago, said, ‘It looks like I may be able to get out of here by mid-November.’
More from
VVN Music