AP: “Amy Winehouse Has Emphysema”
Fisted by stinkfinger under photos on Thu, Jun 26, 2008
Tags: addiction, Amy Winehouse, apparel, Celebrities, celebrity, crack, drugs, emphysema, heroin, impetigo, music, News, not dead yet, self-mutilation, singer, skin disease, tattoos, Weird Heads, zombies/living dead
[7] Comments
Report: Amy Winehouse has emphysema
2 days ago
LONDON (AP) — Amy Winehouse has early stage emphysema and her lungs have been damaged by smoking crack cocaine and cigarettes, her father said in an interview published Sunday.
The Sunday Mirror quoted Mitch Winehouse as saying that Amy has an irregular heartbeat, and has been warned that she will have to wear an oxygen mask unless she stops smoking drugs.
“The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs, it won’t just ruin her voice, it will kill her,” Mitch Winehouse was quoted as saying. “There are nodules around the chest and dark marks. She has 70 percent lung capacity.”
The 24-year-old soul diva collapsed at her north London home Monday after signing autographs for a group of fans and was taken to a London hospital for tests. She remained there all week.
Add to this a recent bout with impetigo* (a relatively common infectious skin disease, seen primarily in children), the well-known heroin and crack addictions, and a propensity for self-mutilation, including pulling on her crackhead toofuses until they get loose and fall out…well, she’s wracking up a fairly impressive array of health disorders for someone as young as she.
Really and truly, I’d like to see her get her shit together, but looking at the behavior and health patterns she’s displaying, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if she doesn’t make it to the end of the decade.
Scary Amy photos after the jump. As you look at these, keep in mind that, as the Huffington Post reports, back in February Amy was paid a cool mil by trendy designers for showing up at the NME (New Musical Express) awards looking like “looking like she’s been dragged through a crack den backwards.” [i.e., a drugged out skank]
*One source alleges that Amy’s impetigo got started thusly: after being told to extinguish her cigarette at a London restaurant, she put it out on her face and the bacterial infection developed thereafter.
Images via Binside TV
Note: The new wordpress upload interface is buggy. Right pissed me off, it did; I had to upload and then hardcode these images in, because the interface locked when I pressed “insert” (that has vaugely sexual connotations, now that I think about it). I’ve experienced this on wordpress.com, proper, too.
DirtFinger
Jennifer
Middle
stinkfinger
June 26th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Wow. Maybe she can get a part in Rob Zombie’s next flick. Sad to see this. She’s got such a good voice.
Will look into the WP interface. I like it. But I haven’t had it lock up on me yet.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:55 am
The whole slo-mo train wreck that Amy Winehouse has become just guts me. I heard of her over here just before she released Back to Black, and I was intrigued enough to go pick it up. man, that’s all I played for a month. Thumb is right about her voice, but what really sets her apart is that she writes good music, elevating her from performer to artist.
When I realized that she was something that could be Big, I emailed a few friends in the US and told them to check her out., They did and liked her (all except this one guy I call “Mitch”), but now I’m kind of embarrassed.
I did a fuck load of drugs in my youth (for me “Youth” went right up to and a little bit into my 30s. Ok a lot into my 30s), and when you live that lifestyle you associate with other drug addicts.
From my experience, and gauging by people I’ve known with varying degrees of drug addiction, Amy is hitting the bottom. She’ll be lucky yo make 25.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were both interviewed seperately recently, and both were asked if there was anything exciting in music that they liked. Both of them said “That Amy chick”. Keith followed it up by saying “But she really needs to get herself sorted fast”.
When Keith Richards says you need to get your shit together…
June 26th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Agreement with what Brother Dirt said. First of all, she does have an incredible, soulful voice – one that truly stands out from the crowd. Grade A talent. Second, having been deep into drug culture myself in my younger days…well, like Dirt, been there, seen that, but Amy appears to be making the descent with roller coaster speed, something that Richards, with even more “experience” than I, picked up on in a heartbeat.
To put a Pollyanna spin on this (which is very hard for me to do, but it can’t hurt), you generally have to bottom out before you start back up. She might surprise us all; I hope so.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Far be it from me to wish ill on someone, but, at the moment the best thing that I can see happening is for her to end up just where she’s headed, then to serve as a cautionary tale for young women and artists. It’d be great if she cleaned up and got her shit together, but that’s been the modus operandi recently and it leaves kids with a false impression; you can be a drugged up crackhead, as long as you clean up before you die!
June 26th, 2008 at 10:33 am
you can be a drugged up crackhead, as long as you clean up before you die!
Well you can, but the validity of that statement needs to be stripped from the advertising propaganda surrounding it, and put into its proper context: go down that road, and the chance that you won’t be a “success story” is far greater than the chance that you will.
In line with certain Buddhist ideas: without putting a consistent effort into “creating value” in one’s life, the innate tendency for humans is to migrate towards “fundamental darkness” – and once you “fall into hell alive” (the earthly, self-devised kind) it’s notoriously difficult (but not altogether impossible) to extricate yourself.
I don’t completely buy into the “negative culture” argument, either. Obviously, being around drugheads leads one into temptation, but much of the time the reasons someone migrates towards drugheads is because one feels the temptation to begin with (borderline types are notorious for drug abuse). She has to make a conscious decision to get away from the culture inside her head. She’s free, white, and over 21 – it’s not like daddy can just lock her in a room until she dries out, and everything will be fine when he lets her out. She’d probably smoking crack the same afternoon. If she does have a bonafide borderline personality, this makes that conclusion all the more likely.
Also, having read a lot about borderline personality disorder (and she fits the profile) she needs behavioral therapy as much or more as she needs rehab. In fact, I submit that rehab is just a band-aid. BPD is thought to result from a dysfunction in the amygadala, – a structure in the brain which regulates emotion. The affected indivudal feels this raging swell of wildly fluctuating emotions from day to day, which creates undue stress on the organism. The dysfunction may be precipitated by a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
To try to regulate their stress, the afflicted often tries to “self-medicate” through substance abuse, which only makes it worse, because they’re just adding fuel to the fire over the long term (this is called “stress intolerance” behavior). These individuals need to be taught strategies to regulate and manage their raging emotions; that’s the fix. Meds that regulate neurotransmitter production – SSRIs or GABA enhancers – can help in this process, but they are generally not the solution, in and of themselves, and they definitely do not combine well with a regimen of street drugs.
A profound irony here is that the burgeoning creativity of an artist is often driven by inner angst; remove the highs and lows, calm the raging storm, and they make better accountants than they do artists. This is not universally true, by any means, but there’s no doubt that some of the most talented, creative people in the world have also been some of the most screwed up. On the other hand, hardcore borderlines almost never get entirely straightened out, so that might not be an issue in Amy’s case.
I also think “borderline personality disorder” is one of those “modern diseases,” something like anorexia, which isn’t so much a “discrete affliction” as it is a “behavioral range” on the bell curve representing a certain percentage of modern young women subjected to the pressures of modern life – or in Amy’s case, stardom. In other words, it’s not on the “schizophrenia borderline” as the term that is still used for it suggests. Schizophrenia is a genuine organic brain disease, which may have environmental triggers, but which is NOT latent in each and every human being. Stated otherwise, I think given the “right” combination of factors, any young woman could be turned into a borderline.
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