Shania Twain recalled having to be airlifted to a hospital in Switzerland after contracting COVID-19 and pneumonia in 2020. The country music superstar, 57, said the “very scary” incident took place during the height of the pandemic while she was staying at her home in Lake Geneva, according to her interview with The Mirror. “It was progressively getting worse. My vital signs were getting worse, and in the end, I had to be air evacuated,” Shania explained. “It took several days to start building up any antibodies at all, so it was a very dangerous time and very scary.”
The “You’re Still the One’ hitmaker said when she first started showing signs of the illness, her husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, immediately began to coordinate her evacuation and soon scrambled to find an open hospital bed. “My husband was freaking out, to be honest,” Shania divulged. “He was really panicking because he was the one having to pull it all together. It was just a real nightmare for him.”
She admitted the airlift felt like it was out of a movie. “It was like science fiction. I felt like I was going to another planet or something,” Shania said. “It all kind of happened in slow motion.” When the singer finally arrived, she was put in isolation and treated with plasma therapy, per the outlet. “I made it through and I’m just so grateful,” she said, before acknowledging her good fortune. “I thought, ‘Wow, if I was living alone in a more isolated scenario, I don’t know what would have happened.’ My heart goes out to people who don’t have that support to help them get the right care,” she explained.
The Grammy winner’s health crisis follows her other harrowing medical scare: her Lyme disease diagnosis. In her 2022 Netflix documentary, Shania Twain: Not Just A Girl, she revealed how she contracted the bacterial illness after being bit by a disease-infested tick during her tour for the album “Up!” in the early 2000s. “My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed I was on stage very dizzy, I was losing my balance,” she explained in the film. “I was afraid I was going to fall off the stage and the stage is quite high. So I was staying far from the edge. I was having these very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly every minute, or every 30 seconds.”
While she did recover from the disease, Shania said her voice was “never the same again.” She had previously admitted to two open throat surgeries to aid in the recovery. And with a little help from her friend Lionel Richie, who convinced her to do a 2011 cover of “Endless Love, she was back in the game!