Didi Dzej: I couldn't walk, a virus attacked my heart
Serbian singer Dijana Jankovic opens up for the first time about six months battling POTS syndrome that pulled her off the stage, and reveals how a virus reached her heart.
- Singer Dijana Jankovic, known as Didi Dzej, has revealed she suffers from POTS syndrome, a disorder of the autonomic nervous system.
- For a full six months she could not walk or work normally, as a virus reached her heart.
- She cannot fly or walk long distances, and her daughter was her greatest support.
- POTS is curable when caught early, so she is slowly recovering and planning a return to the stage.
Serbian singer Dijana Jankovic, known to audiences as Didi Dzej, has broken a long silence and spoken openly for the first time about the illness that pulled her off the stage. In a candid message she shared with her followers, she admitted what she had hidden for months: for half a year she could barely walk.
The diagnosis is POTS syndrome, a disorder of the autonomic nervous system that causes a sudden, excessive spike in heart rate the moment a person stands up. It sounds abstract until you hear what it looks like day to day. And it looks like this: the most ordinary things, getting up, walking, climbing stairs, all become obstacles.
“I have been ill for six months now, I couldn’t walk, keep building my career and live normally, exercise, not even wear heels,” the singer said. A sentence that seems small, yet it describes half a year erased from a life.
How did a virus reach her heart?
The first symptoms arrived early in the year. She was short of breath and losing strength, and doctors initially told her it was just a common virus. It turned out it was not. The virus went further than anyone expected and reached her heart, followed by inflammation of the heart muscle.
It took more than two months to reach the right diagnosis. During that time came chest pain, dizziness, an unstable pulse and blood pressure, and that worst feeling of all, a body that simply refuses to obey. Today, long flights are off limits for her, as is walking any real distance. She has had to slow her life down to the bare minimum.
Through all of it, she says, her greatest support was her daughter. Her child, the singer explains, was the reason she got up even on the days when her body said otherwise. As so often happens, the family carried what the spotlight never sees.
What comes next for Didi Dzej?
The good news is that POTS is not a life sentence. When caught in time, it is fully treatable, and Dijana is finally on that path. Recovery is slow, step by step, but it is moving forward. She says herself that she hopes for new projects the moment her energy returns.
What sets this story apart is not the diagnosis, but the honesty with which it was told. Showbiz rarely shows weakness, and illness even less often. Didi Dzej chose not to stay quiet, perhaps so that someone feeling the same symptoms does not lose precious time on the wrong diagnosis.
Her return to the stage, she says, will come when her body is ready, and not before. And a question lingers in the air: how many times have we read someone’s disappearance from public life as a whim, when behind it stood a quiet fight for their health?
