Shania Twain Details Being Airlifted to a Hospital With Serious COVID Case

October 19, 2024

Shania Twain is opening up about her serious battle with COVID, an ordeal she referred to as "very scary."

In an interview with Britain's Daily Mirror, the 57-year-old singer recalled coming down with a serious case of COVID during the height of the pandemic. At the time, Twain was quarantining in Geneva, Switzerland, where her husband, Frederic Thiebaud, is from.

Twain says as her COVID pneumonia got worse, so did her vital signs, forcing her to be airlifted to a nearby hospital. But that was only the start of her scary ordeal, as Fredric was left scrambling to find a hospital with an open bed. With so much still unknown at the time, hospitals were filling up with patients struggling to breathe, Twain among them.

"My husband was freaking out, to be honest," she tells the Mirror. "He was really panicking because he was the one having to pull it all together. He spent hours and hours every day on the phone, 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."

Twain finally landed in the hospital, where she was isolated and 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 said. "I made it through and I’m just so grateful."

The same goes for Fred, her savior who never left her side.

"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 said.

After getting better, Twain went back to what she does best -- writing music. And born out of the ordeal was a new track aptly dubbed "Inhale/Exhale Air."

Twain says "it's a song of gratitude and appreciation." The inspiration? Easy.

"I was inspired that I still had air in my lungs," she said.

Back in August 2020, the "You're Still the One" songstress told ET about bonding with Fredric and being surrounded by stunning mountains in the town of Corseaux, overlooking Lake Geneva.

“You learn so much about each other, but I think more than anything, I've learned a lot about myself,” she told ET, at the time. “We’re closer, for sure. I think we realized through this that we're definitely going to make it.”

“There's always those moments where you're like, ‘Holy cow. How much more time can I spend with this one person?’” Twain added. “But you realize as well that it is the right person. You realize a lot about yourself and what you really want, and I would never want to be alone in my life, so it's a good thing.”

More recently, Twain opened up about being "petrified" following open-throat surgery just over a decade ago.

"After I had the surgery, I was petrified to make a sound. I didn't know what was going to come out," she told the women's fashion magazine. "It did scare me, but I just had to take a leap and make a sound. And I was so excited about what came out. It was a connection to the vocal cords and it came out very easily. I was really, really, really excited."

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