by Tina Turner
For some reason, word of my new nationality spread quickly and was of great interest to people other than myself. There was such a clamor, along with endless speculation that I must have done it for tax reasons, which wasn’t true. I think that living in a country for seventeen years—with the person you love—is reason enough to call it home, especially when the person you love is about to become your husband.
I hope the details of our wedding are as fresh in your mind as they are in mine, although I’m not sure if my description has done it justice. When I close my eyes, I can still smell the heavenly flowers. I’m probably not the first bride to watch her wedding DVD over and over again, which is what I do, and every time I press “play,” I notice a detail I missed before.
The fairy tale continued the day after the wedding, when Erwin and I set out for our honeymoon at the Grand Hotel a Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda in Italy. We were driving there, and we left the garlands of “just married” flowers on the front of the car, a sweet, traditional touch for a mature couple. It started pouring (thank God it didn’t the day before!), and the flowers got so wet and heavy we had to stop and take them off. The hotel was a perfect place for a honeymoon, with a romantic boathouse we had all to ourselves.
We traded one beautiful location for another when we met Oprah at the legendary Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat in the South of France, to shoot a series of interviews for Oprah’s Next Chapter.
Only Oprah could persuade a bride to abandon her honeymoon. I agreed, partly because we have so much fun together, and partly because I wanted to talk about my old life one last time before I started my new life as Mrs. Erwin Bach. I was willing to discuss anything, including my time with Ike, hoping to put it to bed once and for all.
I had spent the past couple of years planning, organizing, and preparing, I told Oprah confidently, describing the reasons behind my retirement, my frenzy of downsizing, and my determination to focus on what was truly important. I claimed I was taking control of my life. Do you know the wonderful expression “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans”? Looking back, that’s what comes to mind, because “control” is the last word I would use to describe what happened to me. Just three months after the wedding, on an ordinary October morning, when I should have been happily heading off for a vacation in Marrakesh with friends, I was slammed with a devastating reminder of my own mortality.
I woke up, opened my eyes, and tried to speak, but I couldn’t get any words out. Erwin, who is always coolheaded in times of crisis, knew that there was something terribly wrong and immediately called my physician, Professor Doctor Vetter, who told him to give me an aspirin and rush me to the hospital. I kept thinking I was fine. In fact, when I was met with a wheelchair at the entrance to the hospital, I resisted getting into it, surrendering only after the doctor insisted that a wheelchair would get me upstairs faster. The orderlies put me on a table, tucked me under a blanket, and I thought, I guess we’re not going on that trip to Marrakesh. Somehow, I didn’t understand that my condition was very serious, that I’d suffered a stroke.
Deny, deny, deny.
I was so oblivious to what was happening that when I found myself alone in the room, I decided to get up. I swung my legs over the side of the table, and immediately fell down and hit the floor. That’s when I discovered I couldn’t stand on my own. Oh my God, what have I done? I said to myself, as if I had been responsible for my collapse. And how can I fix this? was my next question. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any answers, and I was too embarrassed to call for help. Legs for days and muscles of steel from dancing, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. Terrified, I dragged myself over to a sofa and somehow managed to pull my body into a sitting position, all the while thinking that I couldn’t imagine Tina Turner paralyzed. Eventually, I fell asleep.
The next day, Professor Doctor Vetter told me that I’d had a stroke. This time, I heard him. The stroke had delivered a powerful blow to my body. My entire right side was numb. He explained that I would have to work with a physiotherapist to learn how to walk again, and that using my right hand would be a problem. I even had to be taught a special way to get up if I fell down. I was beginning to understand that I would fall down . . . a lot.
In the normal course of events, we’re carefree, adventurous children when we first learn how to walk, and we have enormous self-confidence because we haven’t encountered the obstacles life puts in our way. But if you have to learn how to walk when you’re an adult, you know exactly what can happen if you fall, and it’s never good. It’s also humiliating. I felt so weak, so helpless. I doubted that I would ever be able to wear high heels again, let alone dance in them.
I stayed in the hospital for about ten days, and during that time I pulled myself together. I’m a fighter, I reminded myself. I always have been. I swore I would never give in—that I would make my leg walk again, that I would teach it and reteach it, until I could stand on my own two feet. I willed myself to do things because, in my life, I always had to push and push, and go and go. It worked, but nothing about the rehabilitation process was easy.
As much as I wanted to focus on my recovery, I had to think about what was happening in the outside world. There were rumors circulating. “Tina Turner Recovering from a Stroke.” “Tina Turner Has a Mysterious Illness.” If the news spread, I would be surrounded by paparazzi and a crowd of concerned fans would mount a vigil at my door. It wasn’t about vanity, although I knew tabloid reporters would knock each other out for the chance to take a picture of me in my miserable condition. I just couldn’t handle the distraction. It would be one more problem to solve, when I was trying desperately to solve so many. I denied everything. We told no one.
A few weeks after my stroke, while still recovering under the supervision of my doctors, I turned to TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) for help getting back on my feet. My face and the way I walked had been affected by the episode. Sylvie Ackerman, my TCM therapist, suggested acupuncture—especially in the facial area, several times a week. I learned that the goal in TCM is to balance the body’s energies—yin and yang, plus and minus—like a battery. I’m very aware of my body, and I noticed every change and improvement I experienced after each session. I called it “taking little, wonderful steps back in life.” When I saw how helpful TCM was, I made it a regular part of my life.
Nevertheless, the physical effects of my stroke would last a long time. To this day, I have difficulty writing a signature that is legible, so autographs are out of the question. But the psychological effects were even more profound. The first time I was aware that something wasn’t quite right in my body was on my wedding day, when I experienced discomfort in my neck and chest after the ceremony. The pain wasn’t dramatic, and it went away as mysteriously as it came, but I started to think that maybe it was a sign. A sign of what? Age? A serious health problem? And now I’d had a stroke, which seemed like something that should happen to an old, unhealthy person, not me.
I was miserable. The battle for recovery left me with no strength or vitality. And I wasn’t just dealing with the aftermath of the stroke. My doctor was concerned that my high blood pressure might be affecting my kidneys, so he referred me to a kidney specialist. Dr. Jörg Bleisch, an expert nephrologist, advised that my kidneys were performing at only 35 percent of their normal function. Concerned, he said that we would have to monitor them carefully, and he prescribed more medication to control my high blood pressure.
While I was processing the disturbing news about my ailing kidneys, I began another chapter in what was turning out to be a long-running health soap opera. The new crisis started a year after my stroke, during a vacation in Greece. I’m a huge fan of movies like Clash of the Titans, and any stories that have to do with gods, monsters, and Greek mythology, so I was eager to see the classic Greek landscape come to life. There I was, exploring the ruins and enjoying antiquity, when suddenly I felt dizzy, breathless, sick to my stomach. The sensation literally knocked me off my feet.
> I discovered that I had vertigo, what the Swiss call “Schwindel,” an extreme balance disorder, and it was unnerving and frightening. The fearless Tina, who’d climbed the Eiffel Tower and danced on a moving crane, occasionally faking a fall just to see the panicked look on her manager’s face (sorry, Roger), couldn’t hold up her head without feeling sick. I couldn’t stand, walk, or focus. In fact, any kind of motion was my enemy. My body was spinning out of control, and my world was spinning with me.
This was a new kind of sick, and I had to get help right away. Luckily, I was living in the country with the world’s best health care system. Vertigo, which is often dismissed as “dizziness” and is an unexplored condition in many places, is a major area of study in Zurich, practically in my own backyard. I was sent to Professor Doctor Dominik Straumann, a neurologist at a special research facility, the Interdisciplinary Center for Vertigo and Neurological Visual Disorders, for evaluation. The experts decided that the reason I was so uncomfortable was that a tiny crystal deep in my ear canal (the term is “otoconia”) had gotten loose and needed to be anchored, a complicated and potentially painful process.
There’s a more scientific explanation, but the doctors determined my treatment would be the chair. I was led through an underground tunnel to a private area in the basement of the university. The first time I saw the chair I made a joke, “Is this where Frankenstein’s monster sits?” It resembled something out of a science experiment—a massive piece of equipment that looked like it belonged at NASA, or on a futuristic roller coaster. Do they expect me to climb into this thing and take a ride? I thought. My doctor, along with his two assistants, helped me up, strapped me in, and turned it on.
The “chair” in question is actually a 3-D turntable which operates as a three-axis stimulator, as I’m told. It spins around in all directions and at all angles. In my case, the goal was to force my stray crystal—the source of my vertigo—back into its proper position. Then, my doctors promised, the disorienting sickness would stop. There I sat, bound to the machine, hurling through space, hands clenched, feet in the air, upside-down, sideways, every which way, eyes wide open, so the doctors could study my irises for indications that the treatment was working. “Don’t move, Tina,” they said repeatedly—which sounded a little funny because usually people expect me to keep moving. But, believe me, humor was not my first response while strapped to that chair. I felt a nausea so deep and intense that it went through to my very soul. I had to go back to the chair for several sessions, and each time afterward I asked myself, “How did I ever survive that?” I felt destroyed. When it was really bad, Erwin had to leave me at the clinic to spend the night because I was too sick to make the short trip home.
It was a happy day when the elusive crystal responded to the chair’s gravity-defying swings and settled into position, signaling the end of my vertigo. The procedure took so much out of me that I sat in a wheelchair for almost a month. It did threaten to come back once, but I summoned up every ounce of strength in my body and forced myself to fight back. As soon as I felt the familiar signs of an episode, I tried to keep still, knowing the whole time that the evil Schwindel was waiting, whispering, “If you move the wrong way, I’m coming.” My whole body broke out in a sweat as I fought the sensation. It was almost like staring down a dog whose eyes say, “If you move, I’ll bite you.” But I held firm, resisting, willing it to go away.
I won the fight, and I was proud of myself, not realizing that there were bigger battles ahead. Battles that would leave me wondering, How did I go from being the picture of health, a cover girl, a bride for God’s sake, to Job?
With every visit to Dr. Bleisch, who was trying to contain my high blood pressure, I developed a growing awareness that something was wrong with my kidneys. I tried to understand the kidneys’ purpose, and why it was important. Something, if I’m being honest, I’d never thought about before. I suspect that most people don’t know where their organs are located, or what they do, until they find themselves in the middle of a medical crisis.
Let’s not forget, we had a language barrier. I speak very little German, so the doctors had to explain complex medical issues to me in English, which was a foreign language to them. It wasn’t easy, but they were very patient with me and did an outstanding job.
The simple explanation is that the kidneys house the body’s filtration system and are responsible for cleaning about 450 gallons of blood every day. In the course of a very complicated process, blood moves through filtering units, which are called “glomeruli,” and waste products are removed and ultimately excreted in urine. When the system is working properly, we’re not even aware that it’s happening. But if the kidneys fail and can no longer prevent the buildup of waste, salt, or extra fluid, the body can be in serious trouble.
If that happens, there is the need for “renal replacement therapy,” either a kidney transplant or dialysis. The gold standard in this situation is a kidney transplant. One fully functioning kidney can take the place of two. With a new kidney, a person can have a very good chance of leading a near-normal life. Kidney transplant recipients live longer than those on dialysis, and they feel better, too.
The other option is dialysis, either hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis. Mostly hemodialysis is used, which usually takes place in a hospital, or a dialysis center. It involves going three times a week, for about four hours at a time, while a machine filters toxins and excess fluid from the blood.
Mind you, I’m not sure how much of this information my mind was absorbing at the time. When you’re sick, it’s so easy to not hear what doctors are telling you—out of fear, resistance, and yes, denial. Even when I was vaguely aware of terms like “transplant,” or “dialysis,” I didn’t think I was in immediate danger.
The plan was to focus on improving, or at least stabilizing, my kidneys. There’s that word again, plan. Not so fast, Tina. You know what happens when you start talking about a plan. It usually means a curveball is on the way, and it was. I was blindsided by news of yet another medical complication, and this was a big one. For months, I had been suffering from the condition no one wants to talk about: chronic diarrhea. I was so weak, and my system was so unpredictable, that I couldn’t leave the house anymore. Actually, I could barely leave the second floor. It took all of my strength to stagger the short distance between the bedroom and the bathroom. I felt like a prisoner and I looked terrible. I barely recognized myself. I was lucky to have Erwin at my side when I needed him the most.
In January 2016, I was shocked to be diagnosed with intestinal cancer—a carcinoma and several malignant polyps, early stage. At this point, we didn’t know if the cancer could be removed, let alone if there would be any next steps. The days of uncertainty were dreadful. I crept around the house, restlessly moving from one room to another. I stared at the lake, the walls, my photographs from the past, even the piano, although there was no music in my life. “Aren’t you sorry you married an old woman,” I cried to Erwin, because we seemed to spend all of our time going from one doctor to another. Fortunately, he had a really good attitude. Erwin always radiated confidence, optimism, and joie de vivre, and he was like that from the first time I met him. With his help, I tried to keep calm during this upsetting roller-coaster ride.
The good thing about a roller-coaster ride is that it goes up as often as it goes down. I had surgery a month after my diagnosis, and the afflicted part of my intestine was removed. Luckily, the cancer had been detected early and it proved to be slow-moving. My doctors were optimistic that it could be cured, and I felt a glimmer of hope again. But just a glimmer, and only for a moment.
Dr. Bleisch explained that my kidneys were deteriorating and we now faced a medical dilemma. Cancer is terrible news under any circumstances, but in my case, the consequences turned out to be far-reaching. As a cancer patient, I would have to take medication to boost my immune system. The problem was that transplant patients are required to take “immunosuppressants,” drugs that have the opposite eff
ect of suppressing the body’s immune system, so it won’t reject the new organ. In other words, the two treatments are contradictory. The drugs used to control my cancer would be in direct conflict with the drugs necessary for a successful transplant, if my kidneys failed to the point where I needed one.
I was shocked to find myself in this awful, between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place position. In the back of my mind, I had hoped that if I ever experienced a true kidney catastrophe, a transplant might be a possibility. But Dr. Bleisch was telling me that, post cancer surgery, that option was unlikely. We would have to postpone any consideration of a transplant for at least a year. A year! As if I had a year. Of course, the bigger question was, where would I get a kidney if I needed one?
In this case, it did me no good to live in Switzerland. At the time, the country’s organ donor rate (from deceased donors) was one of the lowest in Europe, meaning that if I signed up on the waiting list, my name would be there for an indeterminate period. I was seventy-five years old. Realistically, how much time did I have to wait until it was my turn? Would I even get a turn? Being a woman in my seventies made me an unlikely candidate. Being a woman in my seventies with cancer made my situation impossible. Once again, I found myself in a position with strong winds against me. Going to the black market for a kidney was out of the question. I never even considered it. But can you imagine any celebrity trying to buy an organ surreptitiously? It would probably end up on Instagram.
By July, my kidneys were so weak that Dr. Bleisch scheduled me to start dialysis a short time later. I was completely opposed to the idea. “Oh no, no, no,” I told him. “I’m not living on a machine.” It wasn’t my idea of life.
But the toxins in my body had started taking over. I couldn’t eat. I had little pimples all over my stomach. I was surviving, but not living. I guess that’s what happens when you die, you just diminish slowly and slowly and slowly and slowly. In Buddhism, death is acceptance. I’m not a young kid anymore, I thought. Years ago, I might have said, “Oh, I don’t want to die because I don’t know what’s ahead.” At my age, I felt that I’d finished what I came here to do. Once you live this long, there’s not much more ahead. If my kidneys were going, and it was time for me to die, I could accept that. I was just a little bit tired. I would go join my mother and my sister. And it was okay. When it’s time, it’s really time. We do live and die. I was ready to accept that.