Shania Twain feared she would never sing again because of her battle with Lyme disease.
The ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’ hitmaker says the devastating illness caused damage to her vocal chords and it left her worrying if she would ever be able to utter a note again.
Speaking on ITV’s Loose Women, she said: "There was a long time I thought I would never sing again. It took years to get to the bottom of what was affecting my voice and I would say probably a good seven years before a doctor was able to find out that it was nerve damage to my vocal cords directly caused by Lyme disease. Our voice is such a huge part of our self-expression, and for a vocalist, a singer, obviously … it’s devastating in so many ways."
Meanwhile, the 54-year-old singer recently spoke about needing to "rediscover" her voice following her series of invasive surgeries.
She explained: "I had to have an operation that was very intense and it’s an open-throat operation, very different from a vocal cord operation. I had to have two of them, so that was really, really, really tough and I survived that – meaning emotionally I survived – and am just ready to keep going. When you’re a singer and it’s your voice, it is just a terrible, terrible feeling.
"It was a great, great loss, so I had to come to terms with losing the voice that I had and rediscovering my new one."
Some of the vocal damage the ‘From This Moment On’ singer sustained is sadly permanent, but Shania insisted she isn’t letting the uncertain future of her voice hold her back.
She said: "It’s been a long, a really rewarding, journey. What I’ve learned in the interim through therapy is how to manipulate my voice to get it to do what I want it to do or at least close enough. I don’t want to give up, so I’m willing, you know, you just gotta be willing and give in to change and you have to accept that you don’t always have to be the same, and that’s what I have to do, and I’m embracing that."