Avril Lavigne is back after four years of silence – but the break was not voluntary, as she details in a new interview with “Billboard”. The singer, a teen idol from the 2000s, was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2014 and spent “two years without leaving bed.”
Lyme disease, transmitted by a tick, causes severe muscle pain, can paralyze the patient’s face and cause heart palpitations. Another famous person living with the disease is actor Alec Baldwin.
Lavigne says she began feeling symptoms while touring for her last album in 2014. “I visited several doctors on tour. I told them: I’m in pain, I’m tired, and I can’t get out of bed. What’s wrong with me? ?”, account.
Although doctors couldn’t nail down the diagnosis, a friend suggested it could be Lyme disease, and a test soon confirmed the suspicion. “It’s a bacteria, so they give you antibiotics, but it’s a smart bacteria – it turns into cysts. So they give you more antibiotics. Because it took them so long to diagnose me, I was completely f*cked up,” she explains. the singer.
In 2015, while releasing a special song for the Paralympics, Lavigne appeared on “Good Morning America” to reveal the diagnosis. “I thought, ‘I’m going to be brave and tell the world what’s going on’. I did it because I had a new song, and I wanted it to do well. But I wasn’t ready, so I shouldn’t have done it,” she says.
“At the same time, on social media, I pretended to have a certain courage. I didn’t want the disease to be part of my identity. So, when I managed to get out of bed, I immediately put on makeup and took a photo. I pretended that my life was wonderful “, to be continued.
One night, while in bed with her mother by her side, Lavigne realized she was having trouble breathing. “I had accepted that I was going to die. I felt, at that moment, that I was underwater, trying to come to the surface to breathe. Then I whispered, ‘God, keep my head above water,'” she says.
The prayer became a song, “Head Above Water,” the first original released by Lavigne in years. A new album is on the way for next year. Produced by her ex-husband Chad Kroeger (lead singer of Nickleback), with whom the singer still maintains a friendly relationship, the song was the first she recorded after her recovery.
“I was very nervous, I thought my voice wouldn’t come out or would be different. But God looked at me and said, ‘No, you’re going to keep making music’. The good part of all this, this illness, is that I was able to learn to be present – other than a robot that goes from tour to album, from album to tour”, says Lavigne.
