Shania Twain feared she'd never sing again before undergoing two open-throat procedures to fix complications caused by Lyme disease.
The country music icon returned to the studio after a 15-year break from recording when she released her fifth studio album Now in 2017. And speaking to Extra TV, the 53-year-old confessed that before she went under the knife she was unsure whether her voice would ever be strong enough to perform again.
"I had to have an operation that was very intense and it's an open-throat operation, very different from a vocal cord operation," the star recalled. "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."
The Man! I Feel Like a Woman! hitmaker went on to admit her post-surgery voice sounds different to prior to her health complications, and in the time following the procedure, she's had to learn to sing again.
"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 that I... don't want to give up, so I'm willing," Shania shared. "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.
"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. It's been a long, a really rewarding, journey."
Shania will return to the stage in December for the first leg of dates for her Let's Go! residency at Planet Hollywood's Zappos Theater in Las Vegas.
