'Every day my lungs were filling up with inflammation'
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Shania Twain says she was “pretty much dying” during a terrifying battle with COVID pneumonia.
The 57-year-old singer – who is asthmatic – has reflected on her “really bad bout” with the coronavirus and admitted the situation was “very threatening as she found herself fighting for her life when her health took a scary turn for the worse.
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“I had to be airvacked 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,” she told Zane Lowe of Apple Music 1.
Reflecting on how it developed into COVID pneumonia, she added: “Every day my lungs were filling up with inflammation. Every day… Within 12 days, I was pretty much dying.”
The Man! I Feel Like A Woman hitmaker underwent plasma therapy, which started to do its job.
“Thankfully, I had plasma therapy, and it worked,” she said. “On the fourth day, with plasma therapy, I had 0000.1 antibodies. I had no antibodies. I wasn’t fighting it. My antibodies were not building up, and my lungs were getting more and more full of inflammation.”
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She had no idea if the plasma therapy would work or not and simply had to wait for the treatment to “hopefully kick in.”
She recalled: “That’s the sad thing… I think it was more the staff around me were really, really good.
“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?”
Thankfully, the country pop icon was able to make a recovery and she later met a minister who reminded her about how important breathing is, and this in turn inspired her songwriting.
She has penned a new track about the experience, and explained: “[It’s about] 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.”
