After being diagnosed, and subsequently hospitalized, with COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, Marianne Faithfull was one of the lucky ones who was eventually discharged.
Though she technically recovered, the singer was left with three residual side effects — short-term memory loss, fatigue, and permanent lung damage — which she detailed during a recent interview with The Guardian. “I have to have oxygen and all that stuff. The side-effects are so strange,” she said. “Some people come back from it but they can’t walk or speak. Awful.”
Unfortunately, the latter may end Faithfull’s music career. “I may not be able to sing ever again,” she confessed. “Maybe that’s over. I would be incredibly upset if that was the case, but, on the other hand, I am 74. I don’t feel cursed and I don’t feel invincible. I just feel fucking human.”
Though it may seem like a sad outcome for the “As Tears Go By” singer, she’s grateful to be alive. Faithfull’s struggles with a myriad of underlying conditions, including emphysema, paired with her age is not a good combination for someone who contracts the virus. In fact, at the end of her hospital stay, she was prescribed “palliative care only.”
“She wasn’t actually meant to make it through,” her musical collaborator, Warren Ellis, told The Guardian. “That she survived it – it’s insane.”
