Her serious battle with COVID and pneumonia wasn’t the first time the country singer
has faced a health scare. Twain previously spent more than seven years unable to project vocally, worried she’d never sing again, before doctors diagnosed her with Lyme disease from a tick bite in 2004.
The disease damaged the nerves in her vocal cords, doctors discovered.
In 2018, Twain underwent throat surgery to strengthen the weakened nerves.
But between the operation, physical therapy and relearning how to sing, the
“Man! I Feel Like a Woman” singer has fully bounced back.
“I may not be able to [sing] forever,” she told PEOPLE for her December cover story, “but right now I’m just enjoying where I am.” Shania Twain Was So Sick With COVID-Induced Pneumonia She Was Airlifted to a Swiss Hospital. The singer was evacuated while staying in Lake Geneva during the height of the pandemic.
Shania Twain Lyme Disease Story – Bing video
Shania Twain feared she would never sing again after a battle with Lyme disease
affected her vocal cords and caused her to withdraw from the spotlight for over a decade.
The “That Don’t Impress Me Much” singer was opening up to Shania Twain – 60 Minutes Australia FULL – YouTube about the toll the illness took on her, both physically and also emotionally.
“I never thought I would sing again,” she said.
Shania Twain was riding high in the early-2000s, coming off the smash success of the
hit-packed Come on Over and the release of Up! which topped Billboard’s album charts
and got her booked to perform at the Super Bowl.
Then she saw the small bug. “I saw a tick fall off me,” Twain recalled in a phone interview Thursday. The Canadian country-pop music superstar was bitten by the tick in Norfolk, Va., and started immediately experiencing symptoms that threatened her performances.
“I was on tour, so I almost fell off the stage every night,” said the Timmins, Ont.-raised singer-songwriter. “I was very, very dizzy and didn’t know what was going on.
It’s just one of those things you don’t suspect.”
Twain sought treatment and was subsequently diagnosed with Lyme disease,
a tick-borne bacterium that leads to flu-like symptoms and can spread within the body.
For Twain it resulted in dysphonia, a vocal cord disorder that eventually left her unable
to sing for a while and forced her to undergo extensive speech therapy and vocal training. “It’s difficult work,” she said. “It’s like dealing with an injury. I’m just glad that it’s not my heart or my kidneys or something like that. At least I can do something about it.”
A throwback from Shania’s Up! days, hosting the Juno awards in 2003. (Tom Hanson/CP)
With a confessional new single on the charts — Life’s About to Get Good, off her upcoming album Shania Now (due Sept. 29) — Twain is talking for the first time about personal issues including her Lyme battle.
Caught in a ‘very short window.’
Though she was diagnosed right away, she didn’t realize until recently that it was Lyme that led to her vocal issues, which audiences first learned about on the 2011 docu-series Why Not? With Shania Twain.
“It took all these years to determine that,” said Twain. “Then it was all about, ‘Now what do I do about it? How can I fix it?’ So that took several years, just working out what therapy would work for me, without even knowing how well it would work in the end.
“But with perseverance and determination,
I was able to record the album and I was able to tour. Getting through all of that,
I’m encouraged now, and I feel like I can tour again, and I’ll make more records.
So, I’m feeling really successful with that challenge.”
The five-time Grammy Award winner cautions nature lovers to be vigilant about searching for ticks. “[Lyme] is very dangerous because you have a very short window to catch it and then treat it and then even when you treat it, you could still very well be left with effects, which is what happened to me,” she said.
Shania Twain proud of her throat surgery scar (msn.com)
“Normally it can attack your nervous system or the vital organs — heart, liver,
kidneys, nervous system. It’s a debilitating disease and extremely dangerous.
You can’t play around with it, so you’ve got to check yourself for ticks.”
Twain said she counts herself lucky that she saw the tick fall off her, noting many people don’t. “You’ve got to check out where you are and whatever region you’re in and what the rate of Lyme disease is in the region, if you’re going to go out in nature,” she said.
“And I love nature, so that’s a big bummer for me.”
Twain is one of several celebrities who have spoken out about their experience with Lyme disease, including fellow Canadian Avril Lavigne, Alec Baldwin, and former US President George W. Bush. Shania Twain has overcome a number of serious health issues during her career, battles with Lyme disease and dysphonia that robbed the singer of her signature powerhouse country pop voice and led to an extended break in the early and mid 2000s, as well as throat surgery in 2018 to shore up her weakened nerves.
RELATED: Shania Twain Was ‘Petrified’ to Sing
After Open-Throat Surgery Due to Lyme Disease
But in a new interview with England’s The Mirror, the “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” star said she was so sick during the pandemic that she had to be airlifted to a Swiss hospital.
“It was progressively getting worse. My vital signs were getting worse… and in the end.
I had to be air evacuated,” Twain told the paper about the time she got COVID pneumonia in the midst of the global pandemic while in Lake Geneva, Switzerland and got so sick she could hardly breathe.
Once a hospital bed was secured, Twain was airlifted from the Lake Geneva residence.
It was an almost other-worldly experience, she said: “It was like science fiction; I felt like
I was going to another planet or something. It all kind of happened in slow motion.”
Her hospital stay was a different story.
She was put in isolation and treated with plasma therapy, according to The Mirror.
“It was like science fiction, I felt like I was going to another planet or something,” she
said of the surreal helicopter ride to a local health clinic. “It all kind of happened in slow motion.” Luckily, Twain added, husband Frédéric Thiébaud — a Swiss exec for Nestlé — was there with her through the health ordeal, scrambling to find a scarce bed for his sick wife.
“My husband was freaking out, to be honest. He was really panicking because he was the one having to pull it all together,” she said of his rush to get her help. “He spent hours and hours every day on the phone, trying to get an air evacuation coordinated, trying to get a bed lined up, as there were none, checking my vital signs.
Country music singer reveals new details of COVID airlift, hospitalization and admits that 12 days in, ‘I was pretty much dying,’ plus more stars who tested positive (msn.com)
It was just a real nightmare for him.”
Once they found a bed, Twain, 57, said she was placed in isolation and given plasma therapy drugs during a frightening episode. “It took several days to start building up
any antibodies at all, so it was a very dangerous time and very scary,” she said.
“I made it through and I’m just so grateful.” Soon enough, Twain began to recover
and began working on her upcoming sixth studio album, Queen of Me, also due out
on Friday (Feb. 3). Shania Twain: My new album is about ‘loving who you are’
Shania Twain Waking Up Dreaming – Search (bing.com)
Shania Twain reveals she was ‘petrified’ to pose nude for new music | Fox News
Shania Twain Revealed The 1 Thing That Makes Her Feel Liberated (msn.com)
Related video: Shania Twain reflects on career, new album, difficult past (TODAY).
Country singer Shania Twain said that she was so shattered by the collapse of her marriage that she feared she would never sing again. In her first TV interview in five years, Twain told Oprah Winfrey that she became “an emotional mess” when she found out in 2008 that her best friend and her husband had fallen for each other.
“I figured mentally that I would never sing again,” the five-time Grammy Award winner told Winfrey. Twain said she not only lost her husband, but her producer and co-writer when she split with Robert John “Mutt” Lange.
“I hadn’t written a song without this man in 14 years….
How do I even get started?,” she said in an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Twain, whose 1997 album “Come on Over” was a huge crossover hit, revealed that
she also suffers from dysphonia, an ailment where the muscles squeeze the voice box.
“My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice,” Twain told Winfrey. “I was losing it slowly and progressively.”
Twain chronicles the demise of her 14-year marriage and her fight
to get her voice back in a new book “From This Moment On” and a documentary
series Why Not? With Shania Twain Season 1 Episode 1 – Search (bing.com).
She also announced on Tuesday that she would be attending the Country Music Association festival in Nashville in June — and handed out passes to Winfrey’s
studio audience.
In her memoir and TV documentary, the Canadian singer recounts how she
grew up poor and witnessed her stepfather physically abuse her mother on a regular
basis only to see them both die in a car accident, leaving Twain to raise her siblings.
Twain called her husband’s betrayal “a trigger crisis,” and “the straw that broke the camel’s back of something that had already been building.” Eventually, Twain found
solace with Frederic Thiebaud. Search Results for Lyme Disease | Cancer Quick Facts (solitarius.org)
Shania Twain – Not Just A Girl (Audio) – YouTube
‘Not Just A Girl (The Highlights)’ features 18 tracks, spanning Shania Twain’s exceptional career. Shania Twain has sold over 100 million albums globally; she was the first artist and is the only woman to have 3 RIAA-certified Diamond albums and is the recipient of Five GRAMMYⓇ Awards!
The Highlights album serves as the audio companion to her. ‘Not Just a Girl’ documentary which includes Shania’s biggest hits “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” “You’re Still the One,” “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” the new title track “Not Just a Girl,” and more.
Twain added a thankful message to the team that put the Netflix documentary together. The film includes interviews with Lionel Richie, Diplo, Avril Lavigne, Orville Peck, Kelsea Ballerini and more, hailing Twain a “trailblazer” who “paved the way” for other artists. It reflects on Twain’s legendary career, including “enormous risks” and her path to becoming a “global pop phenomenon” while breaking down stereotypes of “what it took to be a country star,” among other notable moments. The documentary goes hand-in-hand with an 18-track album, Not Just A Girl (The Highlights). Watch the full trailer here: Shania Twain turns heads with new look ahead of ‘Queen of Me’ release (msn.com)
BONUS: Fibromyalgia Plagues
Lady Gaga SNL Performances—Here are the Key Symptoms
Fibromyalgia is a condition that causes widespread pain, fatigue, sleep problems,
as well as mental and emotional distress. It can significantly affect daily life and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. an estimated 4 million Americans have it, including Lady Gaga –real name Stefani Germanotta, who has been open about her struggles.
Gaga Five Foot Two 2017 Part 1 – video Dailymotion
Gaga Five Foot Two 2017 Part 2 – video Dailymotion
In 2017, she publicly announced the health issue and shared her experience battling fibromyalgia in her Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot 2. The popstar Tweeted,
“In our documentary the #chronicillness #chronicpain I deal w/ is #Fibromyalgia,
I wish to help raise awareness & connect people who have it.”
The internationally recognized singer and actress has been forced to cancel
tour dates previously as a result of fibromyalgia and in an interview with Vogue
she said, “I get so irritated with people who don’t believe fibromyalgia is real.
For me, and I think for many others, it’s really a cyclone of anxiety, depression, PTSD, trauma, and panic disorder, all of which sends the nervous system into overdrive, and then you have nerve pain as a result. People need to be more compassionate. Chronic pain is no joke. And it’s every day waking up not knowing how you’re going to feel.”
According to the National Institute of Arthritis Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, “Fibromyalgia is diagnosed based primarily on having pain all over the body, along with other symptoms. Currently, there are no specific laboratory or imaging tests for fibromyalgia.”
While fibromyalgia can be debilitating and greatly affect quality of life, it can be managed, experts say. “Fibromyalgia is a very common and treatable illness, “Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum, MD, Director of Kona Research Center and bestselling author of From Fatigued to Fantastic! emphasizes. “There is no lack of effective treatment. Just effective physician education. Long COVID is simply one more form of post viral fibromyalgia. And is also very treatable.” Lady Gaga Performances – Bing video
Can anti-inflammatory diet help Lyme Disease – Search (bing.com)
Can anti=inflammatory diet help fibromyalgia – Bing video