Simply the best… at fighting on: How Tina Turner battled combination of ‘medical catastrophes’

Rock and roll icon Tina Turner has passed away at the age of 83 after battling what she called a combination of “medical catastrophes” during her wealthy life.

Her publicist did not specify Turner’s cause of death, but said she died after battling an unspecified “long illness.”

Turner, whose career spanned five decades, faced serious health problems such as hypertension leading to stroke and kidney failure, colon cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kidney disease

Ms Turner had suffered from severe hypertension since 1978 that went untreated for years, leading to life-threatening kidney disease, one of the leading causes of death in the US.

She was prescribed treatment in 1985, but told herself that the drugs were making her sicker and stopped taking them. Instead, she switched to homeopathic remedies.

Dizzy at her checkup to see how successfully her more natural treatments were working, Ms Turner said, ‘Seldom in my life have I been so wrong. I hadn’t known that uncontrolled hypertension would make my kidney disease worse and that I would kill my kidneys by giving up on controlling my blood pressure.”

She added that her kidneys, which functioned at less than 30 percent in 2016, were the “victims” of her denial that she needed medication to survive, adding that she was “putting herself in grave danger by refusing to accept reality.” to accept what I needed’. daily medication for the rest of my life.”

Renal failure is the final stage of end-stage renal disease, and with no guaranteed transplant on the horizon, patients can expect hemodialysis.

The number of U.S. adults with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is now estimated at 37 million and more than 562,000 are on dialysis, a process that requires the patient to sit still for hours several times a week while a machine that filters the blood removes waste products and excess fluid from the body. blood when the kidneys stop working properly.

Her transplant in 2017 after a period of dialysis was a success, but the battle was not yet won.

Transplant recipients must take immunosuppressive medications to ward off an attack by their own immune system on the transplanted organ, resulting in an overall weakened ability to fight infection.

She revealed she still suffers from long-term ailments from the surgery, including “dizziness, forgetfulness, anxiety, and the occasional bout of insane diarrhea.”

In her 2017 memoir Tina Turner: My Love Story, she wrote, “I know my medical adventure is far from over. There’s always another test, another doctor’s appointment or biopsy to get through.”

She added: “We’re both still here, closer than we could have ever imagined and that’s cause for celebration.”

Heart attack

Ms Turner suffered a stroke in October 2013, three months after her second marriage to Erwin Bach.

She wrote in her memoir, “I awoke suddenly and in a panic. A bolt of lightning struck my head and right leg – or so it felt – and I had a strange feeling in my mouth that made it difficult for me to call Erwin for help. I suspected it wasn’t good, but it was worse than I could have ever imagined. I had a stroke.’

The ordeal sent her to a hospital bed for 10 days and then she had to learn to walk again, heralding a bumpy road to recovery.

She wrote: ‘I had legs and muscles of steel from dancing for days, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. Terrified, I dragged myself to a couch, all the while thinking I couldn’t imagine Tina Turner being paralyzed.’

Age, high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyle and diabetes are known to increase the risk of stroke.

The problem occurs when the blood supply to the brain is cut off and parts of the brain become damaged or die. The damage can lead to long-term disability and can affect how people think and feel.

Colon cancer

Ms Turner was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2016, three years after her stroke.

Colon cancer, also called small bowel cancer or colon cancer, is very rare and accounts for only one percent of cancer cases in the US.

The cancer affects the tube that carries digested food between your stomach and your colon. The small intestine has several jobs: it’s responsible for digesting and absorbing nutrients from food, produces hormones that aid in digestion, and helps strengthen the body’s germ-fighting immune system.

A malignant tumor puts all those functions into question. The exact cause is unclear, but it usually starts when healthy cells in the small intestine develop changes or mutations in their DNA.

A cell’s DNA contains a set of instructions that tell a cell what to do. When the DNA becomes cancerous, the cells continue to divide and replicate unnecessarily. The accumulation of these cells forms a tumor.

Tumors in the small intestine can block food flow and affect digestion. As the tumor grows, it can cause pain in the abdomen. If the flow of food is completely blocked, it can cause excruciating pain, nausea and vomiting.

Cancer may sometimes require surgeryalthough in some cases it can also be treated with chemotherapy.

Ms Turner underwent surgery to remove the cancerous part of her bowel, an operation that delayed her kidney transplant.

Posttraumatic stress disorder

Before their divorce in 1978, Ms. Turner was abused for 14 years by her ex-husband Ike Turner, when she claimed she suffered a broken nose, broken jaw and multiple black eyes.

She said, “I tried to keep myself sane while managing his insanity.”

It got so bad that Mrs. Turner attempted suicide at one point.

She wrote in her memoir that she told her doctor she was having trouble sleeping so he would prescribe her pills – she then took all 50 at once, intending to end her life.

In a 2021 documentary titled “TINA,” the icon said, “It wasn’t a good life. The good did not balance the bad.

“I had a violent life, there is no other way to tell the story. It’s a reality. It’s a truth. That’s what you have, so you have to accept it.’

PTSD can affect people who have experienced or lived through a traumatic event for months or even years.

The condition first came to prominence when American veterans returned from the Vietnam War in the 1970s. It was the modern version of “shell shock,” a term first coined during World War I.

Today, an estimated 13 million Americans deal with some form of PTSD.