Stevie Nicks revealed she wound up in an ICU after her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, saying she knew “something was wrong” before her gala-night performance began.

It turned out the Fleetwood Mac singer was suffering the early symptoms of pneumonia, and the illness has had a permanent effect on her health.

“I have compromised lungs,” Nicks told Variety in a new interview. “The night of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I knew before I went onstage that something was wrong with me, so I had to really pull it together. The next day I got really sick, and I ended up going into the hospital in Philadelphia for a week in ICU with double pneumonia and human metapneumovirus and asthma. Talk about your oxygen levels going down; my oxygen levels were hardly existing.”

She said "you may get over it and just be like, ‘Great, great. I’m good. It’s gone.’ It’s not gone. It comes back in little ways to attack you forever. You’ll never get rid of it. So you don’t want to get it. I’m like, I’ve built like a thin paper shield of magical plastic around me, you know? Because I don’t want my career to be over.”

Nevertheless, Nicks recalled her induction ceremony – the first time a woman has been inducted on two separate occasions – as “fantastic” and “memorable." “I gave the longest speech probably ever given, and nobody threw anything at me or yelled at me," she noted. "So … I talked way too long.”

The experience was so special, she said, that she thinks the upcoming ceremony, which will be held under coronavirus restrictions, should be postponed until it can be staged properly. “I mean, it’s the biggest deal in the world,” she said. “The only people that think it isn’t a big deal are the people who don’t get in. The second that your name goes up, you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s a really big deal.’ And so I’m very sorry that it’s going to be done in some sort of a weird [virtual] reality way, because it’s like not going to the ball.”

 

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