The Beat Goes On

The walk through St. Michael’s Hospital’s hallway to the operating room played like a TV scene for hip-hop artist Haviah Mighty, except no camera was rolling and no one was going to yell “Cut!”

“I couldn’t believe it was happening,” she remembers thinking. “It felt so surreal.”

Her health journey had stretched across many years. And the lessons waiting on the other side, Haviah says, were ones she desperately needed.

“Pain so loud.” - Haviah Mighty, Main Character

In 2021, Haviah became severely ill while touring in the U.K. At first, she explained the symptoms away: it was COVID-19 season, she was working, she was tired. “It’s not that serious,” she tried to convince herself. 

Then her body decided for her. She faced profound fatigue, vomiting, fevers, night sweats, pain in her fingers and toes and, eventually, difficulty walking. Her team cut the tour short. Haviah flew home, was admitted to hospital, and was diagnosed with a bacterial infection that caused endocarditis and embolic brain strokes. The infection was tracking toward sepsis.

She was treated with antibiotics through a PICC line, the infection cleared, and she eventually returned to her life and career. At the time, Haviah recalls, minor mitral valve regurgitation in her heart was noted, but her valve was still functioning.

By 2024, Haviah had never been busier. Airports. Soundchecks. Studios. Stages. Show after show after show. She kept her Notes app full of flight numbers and call times—a written record of just how much ground she was covering. But in the Notes apps were a few other words she’d jotted down quickly: chest pain, shortness of breath that came and went, and came again.

“The symptoms were not debilitating,” she says. “I was still doing my work.”

She received a cardiology referral that summer, and months later, she got an answer: her mitral valve regurgitation had become moderate to severe, and the valve in her heart would need to be repaired or replaced.

“It felt like a relief, but it was also obviously scary,” she says. “I knew it was going to impact everything I had planned—my life first, and then music.”

Before choosing where to have surgery, Haviah met multiple surgeons. The surgery could be approached in different ways, including through a traditional sternotomy, and she wanted to understand what each option would mean for her.

That process brought her to St. Michael’s Hospital and Dr. Gianluigi Bisleri. After the first consultation, she decided he was the one. 

“Dr. Bisleri said a lot of things that I didn’t know about my condition,” she says. “He told me about some aspects that made my condition abnormal, and about why he felt confident doing the surgery.”

There was an attentiveness at St. Mike’s that she noticed right away, a sense that her own concerns mattered. 

The team brought the imaging, evidence, and medical expertise; Haviah brought what she knew about her own body. It was a “collaborative approach,” she says, with a team that listened to what she was saying. “I felt that they were personalizing the care to me,” she recalls. “That meant a lot.”

“I’m not perfect, I need help.” - Haviah Mighty, Boundaries

Haviah’s surgery took around three hours: Dr. Bisleri was able to fully repair her mitral valve using a minimally invasive approach. Afterward came two nights in St. Mike’s Intensive Care Unit.

When Haviah first woke, she could hear her family nearby and wanted to tell them she was okay. She remembers croaking out words. She could hear conversations happening around her but could do little more than absorb them.

“It was just so unbelievably uncomfortable,” she says. “And there was no choice but to go through it.”

And through the haze of the ICU, she remembers Dr. Bisleri’s voice. He would appear, check on her, disappear, and return. Haviah realized he was doing the same with other patients whose hearts he had operated on that day.

“I was in disbelief that he was just saving lives back-to-back-to-back,” she says.

Haviah’s music has long embodied power and strength—a Polaris Music Prize, a JUNO Award, records built on discipline, control, confrontation, and an insistence on looking directly at things others avoid. Her 2019 debut album, 13th Floor, took its name from the number many buildings skip altogether. It stood as a metaphor for the histories and realities we erase because they make us uncomfortable. Two years later, in 2021, Haviah released Stock Exchange.

The idea for Haviah’s new album began before her heart surgery. Its premise, she says, is to embrace every version of oneself: “the weaker version, the smaller version, the anxious version,” not only the strong one. 

At the time, Haviah was deeply invested in “feeling and looking strong.” She had let go of some bad habits, worked out four days a week, and paid close attention to what she ate. She felt disciplined and in control, and she thought that was the version of herself she wanted the world to see.

“I wasn’t actually becoming confident in the lesson I was writing about,” she says. “I was very focused on that ‘perfection.’”

Then surgery disrupted everything. Her health affected her hair badly enough that she cut it short. She could no longer work out the way she had before. Her body changed, and many of the things she associated with progress weren’t there anymore.

“The surgery really reversed all of those things,” she says. “And they’re very visual things, very forefront, cannot-hide-them things.”

She was still an artist; she was still expected to appear, still writing and making music about embracing every version of yourself. And she found herself wanting to hide.

“Oh no, I can’t show my hair,” she remembers thinking. “Oh no, I can’t work out anymore. I’m going to lose my muscle mass.”

After her surgery, the idea at the heart of the album she was working on was no longer abstract. The experience forced Haviah to confront the very versions of herself she had been writing about: the weaker, smaller, more anxious ones. And this time, she had to learn how to accept them in herself.

“I was forced to really live the lesson and the story that I was trying to tell,” she says. “I don’t think you can teach a lesson that you haven’t learned.”

“Reach for my goals, hit it dead center.” - Connor Price and Haviah Mighty, Trendsetter

Today, Haviah is still recovering, with more tests ahead and some symptoms that have yet to resolve. But what she has gained, Haviah says, is patience: with her body, with recovery, and with the parts of herself that don’t feel as strong as they once did.

“I can feel myself shifting and changing,” she says. “And I can feel the transition is not done.”

That patience has also taught her how important it is to listen when something feels wrong, even when the symptoms seem unlikely or don’t fit the expectation for someone her age.

“We have to really listen to our bodies,” she says. “When we don’t feel right, we should go through the inconvenience of figuring out why that is.”

It is part of why her experience at St. Mike’s mattered so much to her, and why she is sharing her story now. Haviah says she valued being part of the conversation about her own care: St. Mike’s team took her concerns seriously, they answered her questions thoroughly, and they considered what mattered most to her alongside the clinical picture.

Now she is back at St. Mike’s—this time not as a patient, but as a partner. Haviah appears alongside Dr. Bisleri in be like mike, a new campaign from St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation, with her song “Trendsetter,” recorded with Connor Price, providing the soundtrack to its anchor film.

But mike is not a person. It’s a shared mindset—a way of showing up with compassion and commitment, of being relentless when the path is hard, and innovative in finding a better one. And to be like mike? That’s to believe there is always more we can give, more we can question, and more we can do for every person, every time. 

For Haviah, that mindset lives in the people who listened to her, the surgeon who treated her as a partner, and the patience she is learning in recovery. To her, be like mike is not about being the strongest or most invincible. It is about paying attention, pushing for better, and showing up when it matters most, for each other, and for ourselves.

“Our experiences are our own,” she says. “I embrace this one.”