Disease-carrying ticks are present throughout the world, yet many people remain unaware of the serious dangers of Lyme disease. Unfortunately, vague symptoms like severe fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, joint pain, and muscle weakness make it difficult to diagnose. But when untreated, it can cause health issues that linger for years.
“Untreated Lyme, or cases that don’t respond to treatment, can cause long-term problems, including Lyme-related arthritis, when the bacteria enter joint tissue and cause inflammation, and post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, which can cause fatigue, pain, and cognitive impairment long after treatment,” Brian Fallon, MD, director of the Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases Research Center at Columbia University, told POPSUGAR last year.
Roughly 476,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease in the US every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Knowing how to prevent exposure (like keeping your skin covered outdoors) is an important step in the fight against the disease.
And because a delay in diagnosis increases the risk of long-term effects, educating others about the risks could save them years of painful symptoms. It also helps when celebrities like Shania Twain, Bella Hadid, and many others who have been treated for Lyme disease use their platforms to draw attention to the condition. Here’s what celebs have said about their experiences with Lyme disease.
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Shania Twain
After being bitten by a tick while horseback riding in 2003, Shania Twain contracted Lyme disease, which caused severe nerve damage to her vocal cords. It took close to seven years to get a diagnosis for why she’d lost her voice and then two open-throat surgeries to finally sing again.
In the Netflix documentary “Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl,” which was released in July 2022, Twain opened up about the initial stages of the disease during the peak of her career. “My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy. I was losing my balance, I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage,” she shared. “I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds,” and then she thought, “I’d lost my voice forever.”
But her two surgeries finally provided a solution. Twain shared in a recent interview with InStyle that it took the help of her friends Gladys Knight and Lionel Richie to get up the courage to try to sing again after the operation. “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 outlet. But ultimately, she decided to give it a go. “It did scare me, but I just had to take the leap and make a sound. And I was so excited about what came out,” she said. “It was a connection to the vocal cords and it came out very easily. I was really, really, really excited.” Now she’s back with a new album.
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Avril Lavigne
Avril Lavigne shared her battle Lyme disease in a 2015 interview with People, saying she was “bedridden for five months” and sometimes didn’t shower for a week at a time because she “could barely stand.” She described it as “having all your life sucked out of you.”
She had to take a two-year hiatus before announcing her triumphant return in a 2018 issue of Billboard magazine. But finding the right treatment that would allow her to return to music was an evolving process. “It’s a bug – a spirochete,” she said, referring to the bacteria the disease is rooted in. “So you take these antibiotics, and they start killing it. But it’s a smart bug: It morphs into a cystic form, so you have to take other antibiotics at the same time. It went undiagnosed for so long that I was kind of f*cked.”
The singer-songwriter started a foundation in her name in 2010 to support those dealing with serious illness or disability, with a specific focus on those impacted by Lyme disease.
