Muni Long is opening up about a recent health scare where she had to undergo a double lung transplant after doctors told her she had one week to live.
Last fall, the Grammy-winning R&B singer was on the road as one of the opening acts on Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” tour, but officially pulled out after a bout of pneumonia. The 37-year-old told Good Morning America that doctors then advised her that her situation was dire and that she needed surgery to survive.
“I should have never taken that tour, but there was so much going on in my life that I had to do it,” explained Long, who suffers from Lupus, an autoimmune disease. “About midway through, we’re up in the north east, it’s really cold, and with autoimmune, the cold is really not your friend. I got really sick, I got pneumonia, I had to step away for a few dates. But I’m like this is not it, I got to go back. I went back and I think maybe about five or six dates in, I was like, this is not… I couldn’t even get out of bed to make my call time for the stage. And the last show, I just barely made it, I was only able to do two songs. My team and my family were like, you just need to come home and rest.”
Long said that she knew something had been wrong for a while, and that she was taking medicines just to get her through the day. After she came home from the tour for Thanksgiving, she woke up in the hospital when doctors advised that she had to undergo a life-saving operation.
“[The doctors] were all like, you need a transplant,” she said. “I’m like, it sounds like you have a time. How long do I have to live? And they go, a week. One week. And my jaw dropped literally. I was like, ‘That’s rude.’ But they just wanted me to, hey, this is not a joke, you need to make a choice. You can either go to hospice or you can get these lungs.”
Now, Long says that she’s doing “fabulous” but that she still has a long way to go when it comes to her voice, as doctors cautioned that it may take six months to a year for her to perform again. “The ego and the vanity was like, what about my voice? What’s going to happen?” she said. “But I look at my son and I think about how much more life that I have to live. And I think just quality of life was first. I can’t sing if I’m not here.”
