After being bitten by a tick while horseback riding in 2003, Shania Twain contracted Lyme disease, which caused severe nerve damage to her vocal cords. It took close to seven years to get a diagnosis for why she'd lost her voice and then two open-throat surgeries to finally sing again.
In the Netflix documentary "Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl," which was released in July 2022, Twain opened up about the initial stages of the disease during the peak of her career. "My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy. I was losing my balance, I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage," she shared. "I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds," and then she thought, "I'd lost my voice forever."
But her two surgeries finally provided a solution. Twain shared in a recent interview with InStyle that it took the help of her friends Gladys Knight and Lionel Richie to get up the courage to try to sing again after the operation. "After I had the surgery, I was petrified to make a sound. I didn't know what was going to come out," she told the outlet. But ultimately, she decided to give it a go. "It did scare me, but I just had to take the leap and make a sound. And I was so excited about what came out," she said. "It was a connection to the vocal cords and it came out very easily. I was really, really, really excited." Now she's back with a new album.
