COUNTRY QUEEN IS BACK Shania: Covid nearly killed me
STAR WAS LEFT STRUGGLING TO BREATHE IN ‘SCARY’ TIME
FROM her home in Switzerland, Shania Twain was used to inhaling the cool, crisp air coming off the water.
But struck down with Covid pneumonia one day, the country legend instead remembers struggling to breathe.
“It was progressively getting worse. My vital signs were getting worse…. and in the end I had to be air evacuated,” she reveals.
Despite being in a bad way, Shania vividly remembers the helicopter trip to hospital.
“It was like science fiction, I felt like I was going to another planet or something,” she says.
Throughout the ordeal, her second husband Frédéric Thiébaud was by her side.
However he was frantic with worry because as well as organising the airevacuation, he was struggling to find a hospital bed which were in desperately short supply.
“My husband spent hours and hours every day on the phone,” she explains, “trying to get an air evacuation coordinated, trying to get a bed lined up as there were none, checking my vital signs. It was just a real nightmare for him.”
Hospital
After eventually securing a bed and arriving at the hospital, Shania was placed in isolation and was treated with plasma therapy.
“It took several days to start building up any antibodies at all, so it was a very dangerous time and very scary,” she says. “I made it through and I’m just so grateful.”
She’s eternally grateful to husband Fred for riding to the rescue. But her heart goes out to others without such a strong network around them.
“I thought, ‘Wow, if I was somebody living alone in a more isolated scenario, I don’t know what would have happened.”
Slowly but surely, the 57-year-old began to recover, and it wasn’t long before she was back writing and recording her sixth studio album Queen Of Me.
She draws on her Covid-19 battle for one song called Inhale/Exhale Air.
“It’s a song of gratitude and appreciation,” she says. “I was inspired that I still had air in my lungs.”
Shania is certainly no stranger to beating the odds.
The five-time Grammy winner — who pioneered country pop with hits such as You’re Still The One and That Don’t Impress Me Much — didn’t sing for a decade after completely losing her voice.
Doctors eventually diagnosed her with Lyme disease from a 2004 tick bite which they believe damaged the nerves in her vocal cords.
With the aid of physical therapy, she relearned to sing and, in 2018, underwent open-throat surgery to strengthen the weakened nerves.
“It’s great to be just singing again, on a tour with my new voice after my surgery…I’m in a very celebratory state of mind,” she says, adding that her voice now has “more rasp” since the operation.
Growing up in Ontario, Canada, Shania lived with her mother, stepfather and her four siblings, two brothers and two sisters.
Money, or the lack of it, was a constant cause of tension, but there was also a darker subplot which the singer has only recently acknowledged: the sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather from the age of 10.
“When I was fondled as a child, it made me retreat from ever wanting to grow into being a woman.”
She says the abuse sparked a lifetime of feeling uncomfortable in her own skin.
Nude
And it was one of the many reasons why she decided to pose nude in the artwork for her upcoming album, which is out this week.
“I went into the most uncomfortable scenario I could think of, which was a photo shoot without my clothes on,” she says.
“And that’s what I did. I just faced it head on. It’s about self empowerment and taking charge of your fears.”
Shania’s first self-titled album came out in 1993, but it wasn’t until 1995 with The Woman in Me and 1999’s Come on Over that saw her hit superstardom and shift 100 million records.
By then she was working with AC/ DC producer Mutt Lange.
She and Mutt eventually married in 1993, and had a son Eja, before Mutt ran off with her best friend, MarieAnne Thiébaud.
They divorced in 2010 but then in a plot twist out of a country song, she then fell in love with and married Marie-Anne’s ex-husband Frédéric.
Shania Twain’s Queen Of Me is out February 3.