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Name: BarryNet Message Board Date/Time: 3/24/2026 11:12 PM Subject: Barry Manilow calls himself 'lucky' amid lung cancer battle
USA Today, 24 March 2026 Barry Manilow is pulling the curtain back on his battle with lung cancer. Months after revealing a lung cancer diagnosis, the "Copacabana" singer is opening up about how the experience shaped his outlook on life. In a new interview with People, Manilow, 82, revealed that he wasn't 100% ahead of the release of his latest studio album in June. "You just don't even think about [how fragile life is]. And suddenly, you have lung cancer. But I’m still here," he told the outlet. "I'm not all here; there's part of me that isn’t here — they took out a part of me, and now I've got to figure out, 'What do I do?'" Manilow told People that he discovered the illness after he complained of pain in his hip and his doctor ordered an MRI. He also got one for his lungs, after his physician signaled concern over back-to-back cases of bronchitis. "If he hadn't done that, man … He saved my life, because there's no symptoms for what I had. I could go on, nothing hurt — but they found the dot in my lung," Manilow said. "They called me and said, 'Could be cancer.' That's a bad word. 'Not me ... I can't have cancer.' They don't even know how long I had this thing sitting on me. It could have been years," he continued. "It just so happened that it hadn’t spread, and boy oh boy, I thought I might be dying." The singer, who canceled several appearances amid the diagnosis, said he underwent a lobectomy to remove the dot on his lung, then spent several days in the ICU recovering. "I'm one of the lucky ones; I don't have to have chemo, radiation and all that stuff," Manilow said. "It has really, really made me take stock of my life. This made me stop and think about: 'Have I done what I wanted to do, and have I made people happy? Have I been a good friend?' All of those cornball things that I’ve read for all of my life, I started to think about that, too. It really did stop me in my tracks." Manilow, a storied musician whose tracks have dominated the radio for decades, released his latest single, "Sun Shine," off a forthcoming studio album on Monday, March 23. "And the answers are yes. And as a matter of fact, there are more yeses than I ever thought," he added. 
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