Shania Twain says she used to have blackouts on stage due to Lyme disease

• Shania Twain shared in her new documentary "Not Just A Girl" how she lost her voice to Lyme disease.
• The singer said she was having blackouts on stage regularly and was scared she was going to fall.

Shania Twain recalled how Lyme disease caused blackouts during live performances and nearly led to the end of her career in her new Netflix documentary, "Shania Twain: Not Just A Girl."

The new film, which premiered Tuesday on the platform, charts Twain's entire career. Towards the end of the film, Twain recounts how she contracted Lyme disease, a bacterial illness caused by a tick, towards the end of her international tour for the album "Up!" in the early 2000s. She said she was bit by a disease-infected tick while horseback riding.

"My symptoms were quite scary because before I was diagnosed I was on stage very dizzy, I was losing my balance," Twain said. "I was afraid I was going to fall off the stage and the stage is quite high. So I was staying far from the edge. I was adjusting what I was doing."

She added: "I was having these very, very millisecond blackouts, but regularly every minute, or every 30 seconds."

Twain said she recovered from the disease but her voice was "never the same again" and she thought she would never sing again.

"It just went into this strange flanging, lack of control of the airflow," the singer said.

At the same time, Twain was also dealing with a divorce from her ex-husband, Robert John Lange, after he had an affair with another woman and left the country singer. The two major crises combined made her consider quitting her music career.

"The grief of that was similarly intense to losing my parents," Twain said, comparing the divorce to the death of her mother and stepfather when she was 22. "It was like a death. It was like a permanent end to so many facets of my life. And I never got over my parents' death, so I'm thinking, 'Shit, I'm never going to get over this.'"

Twain has previously said in interviews that she had to have two open throat surgeries and physical therapy in order for her voice to recover from Lyme disease. She told British talk show "Loose Women" in 2020 that it took seven years for a doctor to diagnose her.

"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," she said.

The documentary also shows how Twain got back into music with a little help from Lionel Richie.

In 2011, Richie wanted to collaborate with Twain while she was recovering. While she was apprehensive at first, Richie eventually convinced her, which led to their 2011 cover of "Endless Love." This encouraged Twain to get back into performing music.

"Shania Twain: Not Just A Girl" is streaming now on Netflix.