Last Sunday, Joni Mitchell performed some of her songs at the Newport Folk Festival for the first time in a while. She wanted to prove she could complete a history-making recovery.
After being diagnosed with a brain aneurysm in 2015, it seemed it was impossible that she would recover.
Joni Mitchell is an award-winning artist with nine Grammy awards and roughly 3.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify. She is the artist of many songs like “The Arrangement” and “River.” One of her songs even reached over 100 million streams.
The last time Mitchell performed was on her fifty-fifth birthday. She is now seventy-eight years old. That performance was 8,660 days ago, about 133 days before she was diagnosed with the aneurysm.
She couldn’t walk, speak, or leave a chair for more than 4 months. She relearned the hand movements on a guitar and how to sing by watching videos of herself. It was unclear what skills the brain aneurysm affected, so we are not sure how difficult it was to relearn.
“That’s a really dangerous condition and nearly half of those patients die before they ever make it to the hospital,” said Dr. Anthony Wang, a neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Hospital.
Mitchell told the Guardian that the polio she had as a child was not as bad as her brain aneurysm. “Polio didn’t grab me like that, but the aneurysm took away a lot more, really,” said Mitchell.
After being diagnosed with a brain aneurysm in 2015, it seemed it was impossible that she would recover.
Joni Mitchell is an award-winning artist with nine Grammy awards and roughly 3.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify. She is the artist of many songs like “The Arrangement” and “River.” One of her songs even reached over 100 million streams.
The last time Mitchell performed was on her fifty-fifth birthday. She is now seventy-eight years old. That performance was 8,660 days ago, about 133 days before she was diagnosed with the aneurysm.
She couldn’t walk, speak, or leave a chair for more than 4 months. She relearned the hand movements on a guitar and how to sing by watching videos of herself. It was unclear what skills the brain aneurysm affected, so we are not sure how difficult it was to relearn.
“That’s a really dangerous condition and nearly half of those patients die before they ever make it to the hospital,” said Dr. Anthony Wang, a neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Hospital.
Mitchell told the Guardian that the polio she had as a child was not as bad as her brain aneurysm. “Polio didn’t grab me like that, but the aneurysm took away a lot more, really,” said Mitchell.
