The first trailer for Demi Lovato‘s upcoming docuseries, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, reveals terrifying details about her 2018 overdose. Doctors feared that the “Confident” singer, then 25, wouldn’t survive after she suffered three strokes and a heart attack during the ordeal. “I had crossed a line that I had never crossed before… I snapped,” Demi shares in the trailer. “My doctors said that I had five to 10 more minutes [to live].”
Paramedics rushed to Demi’s Hollywood Hills home on July 24, 2018 to respond to a medical emergency. The singer was found unconscious inside, and was administered Narcan, a drug used in cases of opioid overdoses. She was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she spent a month recuperating from the medical emergency. Her overdose came one month after releasing the song “Sober,” in which she confesses to relapsing after six years of sobriety.
Though Demi has spoken out about the incident, the details she shared in Dancing With the Devil are by far the most detailed. “I had so much to say over the past two years, wanting to set the record straight about what it was that happened,” Demi says in the trailer. “Any time that you suppress a part of yourself, it’s gonna overflow. I’ve had a lot of lives. Like my cat, you know? I’m on my ninth life. I’m ready to get back to doing what I love, which is making music. I’m not living my life for other people.”
Demi revealed during the virtual TCA press tour on February 16, the day before the trailer dropped, that she suffered serious, lasting side effects after the overdose. “I don’t drive a car because I have blind spots in my vision,” she told reporters. “For a long time, [I] had a really hard time reading. Reading was a big deal when I was able to read out of a book, which was two months later because my vision was so blurry, I dealt with a lot of the repercussions and I think they are kind of still there to remind me of what could happen if I ever get into a dark place again.”
Demi’s stroke and lasting injuries likely mean her breathing stopped at some point, according to Dr. George Teitelbaum, MD. The interventional neuroradiologist, who has not treated Demi, told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY, “In an opioid overdose, if somebody were to really get down to a low level of functioning where their breathing has basically stopped. Then the stroke or brain damage could occur due to low oxygen content in the blood.”
“Some illicit drugs, like cocaine, lead to vasoconstriction and narrowing of blood vessel,” the director of the Pacific Stroke and Aneurysm Center at Providence Saint John’s Health Center added. “And that can occur in the heart or the brain. And in the heart certainly that could lead to a heart attack. And in the brain, it could lead to diminished blood flow and the formation of blood clots and stroke.”
Despite the harrowing experience and aftermath, Demi said that she “wouldn’t change a thing” about what happened. “Everything had to happen in order for me to learn the lessons that I learned,” Demi said. “It was a painful journey. I look back and sometimes I get sad that I had to endure to overcome what I have, but I don’t regret anything. And I’m so proud of the person I am today and I’m so proud that people get to see it in this documentary.”