'My voice was never the same again:' Shania Twain on how Lyme disease ruined her career
Shania Twain, the Canadian singer-songwriter has opened up about her struggle and how her career was impacted after she was diagnosed with Lyme disease in the Netflix documentary 'Not Just a Girl.' Twain, 56, was bitten by a tick while riding a horse in 2003 and was subsequently diagnosed with the disease.
The country music diva explained the origins of her problems, describing them as "very alarming." Twain claimed in the documentary. "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."
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"I was having these very, very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly, every minute or every 30 seconds," Twain said. The 'Man! I Feel Like a Woman!' singer also experienced blackouts and vertigo, in addition to dysphonia. Twain remarked, "My voice was never the same again. I thought I'd lost my voice forever. I thought that was it, [and] I would never, ever sing again." The vocalist of 'You're Still the One' had previously discussed about losing her voice.
Filming a documentary about myself was pretty surreal and even more so during a pandemic! We started this whole thing in 2020 and did a lot of interviews and prep stuff over zoom... pic.twitter.com/ZuIosTNmVb
— Shania Twain 💎💎💎 (@ShaniaTwain) July 26, 2022
"Lyme can affect the nerves that are responsible for controlling the muscles in the vocal cords. As a result, someone could technically lose their voice if they had Lyme disease," Amesh A Adalja, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said in a blog.
Speaking to People, Twain had said, "You start avoiding speaking on the phone, you start avoiding going to places that have ambient noise where you have to speak over the volume of others. It's very debilitating." "Our voice is such a huge part of our self-expression. For a vocalist, a singer ... it's devastating in so many ways," she added.
"Until I got to the bottom of why I was having a problem with my voice, there wasn't really much I could do about it. So it took a long time. I did believe that I would probably have to accept at some point that I was never going to sing again," Twain added. The singer had undergone a number of invasive procedures, including an open-throat procedure, to restore her voice.
The documentary, which premiered on Tuesday, July 26, also featured Twain discussing the trauma of losing her husband, Robert John "Mutt" Lange. The couple ended their 14 years of marriage after Twain learned about Lange's affair with her friend and personal assistant Marie-Anne Thiebaud. It was during the same time that Twain's voice cords were damaged due to her Lyme disease battle.
Twain learned of her husband's adultery via her now husband, Frederic Thiebaud, who was at the time married to Marie-Anne. Twain and Frederic had a strong bond as their friendship developed into love. In 2011, Twain married the 52-year-old Swiss businessman Frederic.