A Bittersweet Divorce, a Brutal Health Crisis and a Truly Bizarre Conspiracy Theory: Inside Avril Lavigne’s Dramatic Last Few Years

For a while there, Avril Lavigne was drowning.

It was 2014 and the pop star, a year into her whirlwind second marriage to Nickleback frontman Chad Kroeger, was busy touring in support of her self-titled fifth album, released in November the year prior. And the Canadian was feeling uncharacteristically unwell and could not figure out why.

She visited doctor after doctor, presenting them with the same thing: “I’m achy, I’m fatigued, I cannot get the f–k out of bed,” as she recalled to Billboard in October. “What the f–k is wrong with me?” Their conclusions? Dehydration and exhaustion.

But when the tour ended, taking the apparent root cause for her diagnoses with it, things only got worse. By October, during a trip to Las Vegas with girlfriends to celebrate her 30th birthday, she was almost entirely unable to participate in the simplest of activities. “I could barely eat, and when we went to the pool, I had to leave and go lie in bed,” she told People in 2015. “My friends asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ I didn’t know.”

But when one friend’s intuition brought her to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Yolanda Hadid, who knew a thing or two about battling a mystery illness and, in turn, gave Lavigne the number of a specialist, the pop-punker finally got the answers she’d been longing for: She was suffering from a severe case of Lyme disease. “It was a relief,” she told The Guardian in January. “I was like: ‘OK, now I can at least start treating something.'”

And then, as she told Billboard? “I was in bed for f–king two years.”

At first, she suffered in silence at her home in Ontario, not letting the world in on what had befallen her. She was put on multiple antibiotics and antimalarials, prescribed by doctors to combat a disease that doesn’t yet have a standard protocol for treatment. “It’s a bug—a spirochete—so you take these antibiotics, and they start killing it,” Lavigne, who celebrates her 35th birthday on September 27, explained to Billboard. “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 f–ked.”

Her mom moved in help take care of her, filling in for Kroeger who could only be of assistance sporadically during breaks in his tour. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t move. I thought I was dying,” she told People. “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.”

Billboard Music Awards, Chad Kroeger, Avril Lavigne
Jason Merritt/Getty Images
With her fans growing worried by her absence from the spotlight, she took to social media in December to explain why she hadn’t been seen in weeks. Interacting with fan site @AvrilMusicChart on Twitter, she wrote in direct message, “I feel bad because I haven’t been able to say anything to the fans to let them (know) why I have been absent. I’m torn as I’m quite private. I’m not feeling well. I’m having some health issues. So please keep me in your prayers.”

The private message soon became public and went viral. The hashtag #PrayForAvril soon began to spread. “The get-well messages and videos they sent touched me so deeply,” she told People. And yet, she still wasn’t ready to let them in on what, exactly, was going on.