"I felt like I couldn't breathe, I couldn't talk and I couldn't move. I thought I was dying."
This was how Avril Lavigne described her battle with Lyme disease last year.
She narrated that before her 30th birthday celebration in Las Vegas in October, she was already feeling ill. "I could barely eat, and when we went to the pool, I had to leave and go lie in bed," she recalls, adding that she'd felt lethargic and lightheaded for a while. "My friends asked, 'What's wrong?' I didn't know."
Lavigne was diagnosed with a severe case of Lyme disease which is transmitted through a bite from a specific type of tick.
"I had no idea a bug bite could do this," she says. "I was bedridden for five months." She thinks that a tick bit her sometime in the spring of 2014.
As the "Rock 'n' Roll" singer reveals in the April 13 issue of People, she spent five months recuperating at her home in Ontario. Her husband Chad Kroeger and her mother took care of her while she was ill.
"There were definitely times I couldn't shower for a full week because I could barely stand. It felt like having all your life sucked out of you," the singer says.
The "Girlfriend" singer added that she did not reveal to the public about her illness, but she opened up to a fan in Twitter late last year. "They were asking about me since I was MIA, so I mentioned to one fan directly that I wasn't feeling good. The get-well messages and videos they sent touched me so deeply," she recalls. "I lay in bed watching them and cried so much because I felt loved."
Lavigne says she is still recovering from the illness but is feeling "80 percent better.
"This was a wake-up call," the "Sk8er Boi" singer says. "I really just want to enjoy life from here on out."
Lavigne plans to jumpstart her career this year. She is scheduled to unveil "Fly," a promotional song for the 2015 Special Olympics. Earlier this year, she has done a video for her single "Give What You Like" off her 2013 self-titled album "Avril Lavigne."
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