Yahoo Movies Shania Twain reveals she nearly died from COVID-19: 'It was very bad'
Shania Twain is opening up about a harrowing bout of COVID-19 that nearly cost her her life.
In an interview Wednesday with Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, the country-pop superstar revealed that she got so sick from the coronavirus 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 said. "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."
Describing the situation as "very bad," Twain noted that she developed COVID pneumonia. "Every day my lungs were filling up with inflammation. Every day. Within 12 days, I was pretty much dying. Thankfully, I had plasma therapy, and it worked. 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."
Twain had to wait for the plasma therapy, which is not always effective, to "hopefully kick in." She said, "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?"
She added that she was "halfway into what would've been considered my maximum treatment. They didn't say that, which was great."
After the traumatic experience, Twain had an encounter with a minister who reminded her about the significance of being able to breathe fresh air. "He said, 'What you gonna do with that?'" she recalled, adding that she wrote a song soon after 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."
No stranger to health scares, Twain was previously diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2003, which led to a decades-long battle with the illness. "I was very scared for a little while that I wouldn't sing again, ever," she told PEOPLE in 2017. "I went through that moment, but I found a way. I found a way to do it."
Watch the video above for more from Twain.
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