Shania Twain

Canadian country singer Shania Twain has spoken about her two-decade struggle with Lyme disease. In her new Netflix documentary “Not Just a Girl,” Twain discusses her life as a celebrity mother and her struggles with the illness, which is caught from the bite of an infected tick.

Twain contracted the disease in 2003 while horse riding.

“Before I was diagnosed, I was on stage very dizzy,” she said in the documentary. “I was losing my balance and was afraid I was going to fall.”

Twain added that she was having blackouts, “regularly, every minute or 30 seconds.”

She said the illness also led to a disorder known as dysphonia, which resulted in temporary voice loss.

“My voice was never the same again,” she recalled. “I thought I’d lost my voice forever. I thought that was it, and I would never, ever sing again.”

Twain told an interviewer in 2019 that she underwent surgery to restore her voice.

“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 tough and I survived that — meaning emotionally I survived — and am just ready to keep going,” she said.

Talking about her role as a mother, Twain said that she prioritized her son over her career and worked on music only in her free time or when he was asleep.

“I would go into the studio and do vocals. I’d have about four hours once he was sleeping,” she said.

“I never wanted to be a mother who was absent and distracted by career,” Twain added. “Career could never come first over my child.”

The singer was previously married to record producer Robert John Lange, with whom she has one child, son Eja

Lange, now 20.