Barry Manilow details cancer journey: 'I thought I might be dying'

Barry Manilow feels lucky to be alive after receiving a diagnosis of stage 1 lung cancer followed by surgery.

In his new People magazine cover story, Manilow reveals that he went to the doctor in November for an unrelated problem, but his doctor ordered an MRI for his lungs after learning that he'd had bronchitis twice recently.

"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 tells People. "They called me and said, 'Could be cancer.' That's a bad word. 'Not me. F*** you. I can't have cancer.'"

But he did.

"They don't even know how long I had this thing sitting on me. It could have been years," Manilow says. "If it had gone any further, then I would be up s***'s creek. It just so happened that it hadn't spread, and boy oh boy, I thought I might be dying."

Manilow eventually had a lobectomy to remove part of his lung, and then spent a week in the ICU. He tells People, "I don't remember it, thank goodness, because it was a nightmare."

But, he adds, "I'm one of the lucky ones; I don't have to have chemo, radiation and all that stuff."

However, Manilow, whose new album is coming out in June, says the experience certainly made him "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," he says.

"And the answers are yes. And as a matter of fact, there are more yeses than I ever thought."