One tick bite changed the course of Shania Twain‘s life and career forever.
A new documentary about Twain, called Not Just a Girl, was just released on Netflix. While we’ve heard Twain talk about her struggles before, this documentary gave her the chance to fully open up about everything she’s been through.
As Twain explained, she was bitten by a tick while horseback riding in 2003. She ended up contracting Lyme disease, and her vocal cords were damaged.
“My voice was never the same again,” Twain said. She fully believed her singing career was over.
“I thought I’d lost my voice forever,” she said. “I thought that was it, [and] I would never, ever sing again.”
But it took some time for doctors to make the connection between Twain’s Lyme disease diagnosis and the loss of her voice. By the time they made the connection, the damage to her voice was permanent:
“There were seven years where I could not, for example, yell out for my dog,” she said. “My voice would just cut out in certain places. And it took another several years to determine what it was. It wasn’t anything obvious. Nobody connected the Lyme disease to it. In the end, a neurologist finally connected that it was the nerve to each vocal cord.”
