Def Leppard guitarist and background vocalist Vivian Campbell revealed he’s in remission from Hodgkin lymphoma after being identified over a decade in the past, saying that he owes his donor a beer “or two or three.”
“I did a PET scan in the middle of April, and I’m 100% clean, completely in remission for the first time in 12 or 13 years,” Campbell mentioned on SiriusXM’s “Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk”. “I am obviously overjoyed. You couldn’t ask for more than that. I had an incredible donor.”
The 62-year-old was identified with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2013 and mentioned he went “through the mill with all sorts of chemo and immunotherapy and combination therapies” till he obtained a “really, really successful” bone marrow transplant on New 12 months’s Eve in 2024.
Campbell shared that his earlier efforts to fight most cancers didn’t stick and that it “kept coming back.”
“Ten years ago, I did an oncologist stem cell transplant, which means using my own stem cells,” Campbell defined. “That didn’t work. The cancer kept coming back. And then a couple of years ago, it really got bad… the doctors told me my only chance for a cure was to do a donor transplant.”
The Northern Eire-born musician was initially presupposed to obtain a transplant after Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, he misplaced his preliminary donor 10 days earlier than the surgical procedure, which he described as a “kick in the nuts.”
Medical doctors discovered a 21-year-old donor with “10 out of 10” genetic markers to step in and save Campbell.
“He put his name on the donor registry, for no reason other than he’s a good person,” Campbell mentioned. “There are a lot of good people out there, I’m glad to say.”
The “Love Bites” guitarist claimed he received’t discover out the id of his donor for some time.
“After two years, they give you the option to contact your donor,” Campbell mentioned. “So you can reach out to them. I would imagine [that] in this day and age it’s via e-mail.”
Campbell plans to achieve out to his savior and “buy him a beer or two or three.”
“If they want to correspond with you, they can,” Campbell mentioned. “They don’t have to. But obviously, it’s a life-saving proposition, so I’d certainly want to express my gratitude.”
The rocker recovered within the hospital for practically a month after the transplant, which brought on him to skip the band’s first present of 2025.
“I just have to keep my head down and my spirits up for the next 100 days of primary recovery,” Campbell wrote in a press release on the band’s Instagram web page in January.
Campbell joined Def Leppard in 1992 after guitarist Steve Clark died from a deadly mixture of alcohol and pharmaceuticals in 1991.
Hodgkin lymphoma is a bunch of blood cancers that begin in lymphocytes — white blood cells in your lymphatic system,” in accordance with the Cleveland Clinic.
The nonprofit group provides that Hodgkin lymphoma is taken into account “one of the most curable cancers.”
