Avril Lavigne has opened up about living with Lyme disease, revealing she’s been “in bed for two fucking years”.
The ‘Sk8er Boi’ singer has returned to music following a four year break after falling ill during her 2014 tour. In September, she shared an emotional comeback message on “the worst years of her life”.
The singer spoke to Billboard about the period before her diagnosis with Lyme disease, recalling: “I’m achy, I’m fatigued, I cannot get the fuck out of bed – what the fuck is wrong with me?”.
Lavigne explained that she had visited a number of doctors before consulting former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Yolanda Hadid – who also has Lyme disease – for advice on specialists.
“I was in bed for fucking two years,” she said. “It’s a bug – a spirochete – 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 fucked.”
She also revealed that new song ‘Head Above Water’ was inspired by her health problems.
“I had accepted that I was dying,” she said. “And I felt in that moment like I was underwater and drowning, and I was trying to come up to gasp for air. And literally under my breath, I was like, ‘God, help me keep my head above the water.'”
Watch the video for ‘head Above Water’ below.
Lavigne briefly touched on past romances, saying: “I love love, the way I looked at it is I married my long-terms”. She described both her first husband Sum 41 frontman Deryck Whibley as a “good Canadian guy” and second husband Kroeger as a “great Canadian guy”.
Kroeger worked on ‘Head Above Water’ and a number of other tracks on Lavigne’s upcoming album, due to be released in 2019.