Nearly five years after surgeons removed his entire stomach to save his life, Exodus drummer Tom Hunting is almost there.
In a recent conversation with the Talk Louder podcast — hosted by veteran music journalist "Metal Dave" Glessner and vocalist Jason McMaster — Hunting gave one of his most candid health updates yet. At 60, he's approaching a milestone most cancer patients hold onto like a lifeline: five consecutive years without the disease.
"I'm almost at the five-year point now of being without cancer, and I'm stoked," Hunting said. "They test me all the time. They do pretty thorough scans every six months."
For those who followed the story from the beginning, this statement carries the kind of weight that no press release can manufacture.
The Road That Got Him Here
Back in 2021, Hunting went public with a diagnosis that stopped the metal community cold. What started as unexplained weight loss and a complete absence of hunger led to an endoscopy — the test he's since urged every fan dealing with gut issues to demand, not request. The scope found squamous cell carcinoma in the cardia region of his stomach.
Then the situation got harder.
During a laparoscopic procedure to assess his candidacy for surgery, doctors found nodules of mesothelioma on his abdominal wall — a second, separate cancer. For a brief, brutal period, the prognosis looked like stage four, and the conversation shifted from cure to comfort. "There was a minute there where I was, like, stage four plus plus plus," Hunting recalled. "'Give him chemo. Keep him comfortable.'"
Further testing confirmed the mesothelioma was a different type than the stomach cancer — which made him eligible for surgery. The total gastrectomy removed his stomach, 42 lymph nodes, and every cell doctors could find. Not one lymph node came back positive.
"The best three words you can hear are 'nothing to see,'" he said.
Following the surgery, Hunting underwent five and a half months of immunotherapy — a protocol that trains the immune system to identify and destroy rogue cells. The technology, he notes, barely resembled what existed five years earlier.
"Science is killer, and what they're able to do for people in my situation and others nowadays is leaps and bounds from what they could do even five years ago."
Skiing, Drumming, and Getting Strong Again
What does recovery look like for a man with no stomach? Apparently, it looks like a ski mountain.
Hunting is clear-eyed about where he still has work to do. His core — devastated by a surgery that opened his abdomen, removed a major organ, and required extensive reconstruction — is still coming back online. He's rebuilding stamina the same way he's always built things: through repetition, through movement, through things he loves.
"I'm skiing a lot. I love snow skiing, trying to get my core strong, and playing drums. And the bonus of all that is both things are fucking fun."
That's not motivational poster language. That's a man five years into the most serious fight of his life describing how he gets out of bed and earns his health back every single day.
The mental side has been its own discipline. Hunting coined a term for the anxiety that sets in before every scan: "scanxiety." It's real, it's specific, and it's something survivors across every disease know intimately. The way he handles it is direct: don't feed it.
"I just kind of take it day by day and try not to give cancer too much energy."
The Thing He Keeps Saying
In every interview Hunting has given since going public with his diagnosis, one theme recurs. He's not just surviving — he's positioned to be useful to the next person who gets the news.
"I want people to know about it and I want people to get checked," he said back in December 2021, when he was still mid-treatment. "I'm not saying those drugs they give you for your gut are bad. They get you by. But if you're having what you think is a gut problem, tell 'em you wanna get scoped."
That message hasn't changed. If anything, approaching five years cancer-free has given it more credibility.
"I want to be that ear for somebody who's recently getting told that news."
In a scene that doesn't always do vulnerability well, Hunting has been remarkably consistent about this. He went public with a condition that's still heavily stigmatized in its early stages — a gut problem, weight loss, not the dramatic symptoms people associate with "cancer" — specifically because he knew other people were probably dismissing the same symptoms he'd been dismissing.
The GoFundMe that fans and fellow musicians rallied around raised over $114,000 to help cover his medical costs. Kirk Hammett threw in $5,000. Chris Jericho contributed $1,500. The community showed up the way metal communities do.
What It Means
Tom Hunting returned to the stage at Aftershock 2021 while he was still in recovery. He's been behind the kit for Exodus's touring cycle since, including the band's run supporting the recently released Goliath — their twelfth studio album, out March 20 on Napalm Records. Hear more about the Goliath album announcement and what it means for the band's next chapter.
It would be easy to write about Tom Hunting's cancer story as inspiration porn — the drummer who beat the odds, the fighter who returned to the stage. That frame sells tickets and generates clicks. It's also reductive.
What Hunting actually represents is something more specific: a musician who took an extraordinarily difficult situation, processed it with unusual clarity, and turned it into a resource for other people going through the same thing. He didn't perform toughness. He described the scanxiety, the "stage four plus plus plus" conversation, the moment chemo failed and surgery became the only option. He told the truth in real time, when the outcome wasn't certain.
Five years is the number oncologists use. It's the threshold where recurrence rates drop significantly, where surveillance protocols change, where the language shifts from "in remission" to something closer to cleared. Hunting is almost there.
He's earned every scan that says nothing to see.
Exodus's twelfth studio album, Goliath, arrives March 20 via Napalm Records.
