Shania Twain shared more details about her COVID-19 battle in another interview this week. In a sitdown with Apple Music 1 host Zane Lowe, published on Wednesday, Twain said she was “pretty much dying” at one point in her ordeal. Twain, 57, has been busy promoting her new album, Queen of Me, her first since 2017’s Now and just her second since 2002.
Twain’s bout with COVID pneumonia was so difficult that she was airlifted to the hospital. “I’m asthmatic anyway, and then I had a really bad bout with COVID, and it was very threatening,” Twain told Lowe, via Entertainment Weekly. “I had to be air-vacked by a special team because nobody else would fly me to the hospital because you can’t just pick up a COVID patient and fly them to a hospital.”
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The situation was “so bad,” Twain said as she went into graphic detail about her experience. “Every day my lungs were filling up with inflammation. Every day. Within 12 days, I was pretty much dying,” she said. She said she had “no antibodies” and her immune system was not fighting the virus. “My antibodies were not building up, and my lungs were getting more and more full of inflammation,” the singer said.
Thankfully, plasma therapy worked for Twain, although it is not always effective. Eventually, it kicked in for her.”That’s the sad thing… I think it was more the staff around me were really, really good,” she said. “They didn’t tell me how many more days of plasma therapy that I could not respond to before I was now, then on a respirator. On my way out. You know?”
After her experience, Twain bumped into a minister who reminded her how important is it to breathe fresh air. He asked her what she was going to do with that important ability. She soon wrote a song “all the things that you can do with air that we take for granted – all the things that you can celebrate, like blowing bubbles and flying balloons and throwing your hands up in the air.”
Twain also described her experience with COVID pneumonia in an interview with The Mirror, in which she recalled how her husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, frantically struggled to find a hospital bed for her in Switzerland. She called the experience a “real nightmare” for him. The Queen of Me song “Inhale/Exhale Air” was inspired by her COVID battle and the words of the minister she met. “It’s a song of gratitude and appreciation,” Twain told The Mirror. “I was inspired that I still had air in my lungs.”
Before the COVID pandemic, Twain struggled with Lyme disease after a tick bite. She was diagnosed with the illness in 2004 and it damaged her vocal cords. She needed physical therapy and had open-throat surgery in 2018 to strengthen her nerves. Twain’s new album, Queen of Me, will be released Friday, and she starts a world tour to support the record in April.
