Tina’s darkest days

The star opens up about her dark est days

She became famous for her energetic dance routines and incredible legs, but Tina Turner has revealed she’s been so sick in recent years that she even considered euthanasia – it was only a life-saving kidney donation from her husband that changed her mind!

The “Private Dancer” singer, 78, first became unwell on her wedding day in 2013, when she felt faint after marrying her partner of 28 years, German music executive Erwin Bach, 62. It was the happiest day of her life, but in her new autobiography MyLoveStory, Tina writes, “That funny turn was the first sign of a hellish ordeal to come.”

Three months later, the music legend woke up with

pain in her head and right leg. The star recalls, “I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get any words out. I was having a stroke.” She was left unable to walk or use her right hand.

But worse was to come. Tina was then diagnosed with high blood pressure, kidney disease and later, intestinal cancer, which saw part of her bowel removed. When her kidney function fell to just 20%, she was unable to eat and looked into euthanasia, which is legal in Switzerland, where she lives.

“I do not want to sit and suffer,” the singer explains. “I thought, ‘This is my time,’ and it was OK with me. There was nothing else I wanted to do, nowhere I wanted to go. I decided I would just rather leave the planet.”

But Erwin told his wife, “I do not want another woman in my life. I am not ready to deal with that.” He offered to donate Tina one of his kidneys. She says, “We call it ‘The Baby’ because it’s like me being pregnant – it’s part of him. So now I have three kidneys and he only has one.”

Tina has also opened up about the July suicide of her eldest son Craig, revealing that the 59-year-old shot himself with a gun that used to belong to her mother.

He was born when the singer was just 18 and she calls his funeral “my saddest moment as a mother”, blaming her son’s alcoholism and loneliness on her abusive first husband Ike Turner, who adopted him. “I was as good a mother as I could

be under the circumstances,” she says.

Tina also sensationally reveals in her book that Ike, who died of a cocaine overdose at age 76, took her to a Mexican brothel on the night of their wedding in 1962.

“The experience was so disturbing that I suppressed it, scratched it out,” she tells. “I was miserable the whole time, on the verge of tears, but there was no escape. We couldn’t leave until Ike was ready and he was having a fine time.”