Shania Twain opened up about the chronic illness that almost ended her career.
In the country superstar’s Netflix documentary, “Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl,” she revealed she suffered from “blackouts” and “dizzy” spells when performing on stage prior to her Lyme disease diagnosis.
The singer had been bit by a tick while horseback riding in 2003 and labeled her symptoms “quite scary.”
“Before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy,” she explained. “I was losing my balance, I was afraid I was gonna fall off the stage.”
She added, “I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds.”
Her chronic illness impacted her ability to perform and Twain developed dysphonia, which resulted in the temporary loss of her voice. “My voice was never the same again,” she confessed. “I thought I’d lost my voice forever. I thought that was it, [and] I would never, ever sing again.”
Shania went through several invasive surgeries to correct her dysphonia and told Extra in an interview in 2019, “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.”
In the midst of her health battle, the “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” singer went through a divorce after 15 years of marriage after her husband allegedly had an affair with personal assistant Marie-Anne Thiébaud.
“In that search to determine what was causing this lack of control with my voice and this change in my voice, I was facing a divorce. My husband leaves me for another woman,” Shania said in the documentary. She shared that she felt at “a whole other low” and “didn’t see any point in going on with a music career.”
In a shocking turn of events, Twain found her voice and new love when she and Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, bonded over their grief in 2010.
Their bond soon turned romantic and the couple tied the knot a year later.
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