Demi Lovato Reveals She Still Has Hearing Loss & Vision Impairment Following 2018 Overdose
Written by djfrosty on July 14, 2023
Demi Lovato was lucky to survive her 2018 drug overdose, immediately after which the musician suffered three strokes and a heart attack. But in a raw new interview with Andy Cohen for SiriusXM, Lovato shared that almost exactly five years out from the near-fatal incident, they still experience hearing loss and vision impairment as a result.
“I wouldn’t change my path because I don’t have any regrets,” the 30-year-old “Cool for the Summer” singer began. “When I think about things, the closest thing that I get to a regret is when I overdosed … that overdose caused me a lot of … it actually caused a disability. I have vision impairment and hearing impairment to this day.”
“I don’t drive because I have blind spots in my vision,” she continued. “It’s a daily constant reminder. You know, anytime I look at something, like, I have blind spots in my vision when I look at your face, and so it’s a constant reminder to stay on the right path because I never want that to happen again.”
Lovato was rushed to the hospital July 24, 2018, after overdosing on heroin, having relapsed earlier that year after six years of sobriety. The former Disney star is now sober, revealing last year they completed another round of treatment in 2021 before starting work on 2022 album Holy Fvck.
“Luckily in the mind state that I’m in now — you know, being sober, having a clear head — I just think in a more positive mind space and I’m not focusing on the shame at all,” she reflected. “I know I have a lot of sympathy for where I was at that time and the choices that I made and I understand why it happened and what happened, but there’s no shame that comes with it because it was just a life lesson that I had to learn.”
In recent years, Lovato has pivoted from pop to rock music — even holding a “funeral” for their former genre — and recently announced that an album of rockified versions of older pop hits such as “Heart Attack” and “Sorry Not Sorry” called REVAMPED is dropping in September. But Lovato also told Cohen that she’s not necessarily done with pop music forever and even dreams of collaborating with Kelly Clarkson someday.
“I never say never because you never know what’ll happen, but I’ve just been really influenced by rock music and it’s what I have fun performing live,” Lovato shared. “It was just the path that I took at that time and then when I started, I got sober and I was reevaluating everything in my life including my music and I was like, ‘What makes me happy?’ Like, that’s the most important question and I was like, ‘What makes me happy is listening to rock music and performing rock music.’”
Watch Lovato on SiriusXM above.