Shania Twain has proven that she intends to keep her voice "Forever and Always," but things could have been different. Twain is opening up about the vocal problems she overcame in the past due to her battle with Lyme disease.

"I was on a long sabbatical, and my son, Eja, 18, was getting older. I love being a full-time mom, but I started thinking, ‘What am I going to do when I have an empty nest?’ I had a problem with my voice; I was avoiding doing something about it," she tells People, recounting how she struggled to regain her singing voice after her 2015 Rock This Country Tour.

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It wasn't unit Twain's vocal problem progressed to the point where she could "barely sing anymore" did the singer take action.

"... I was like, ‘I’m humiliating myself. I can’t get out there and do this. I have to stop until I figure it out.’ I thought that it was just fatigue or burnout," she admits. "But no — Lyme disease commonly affects the nerves. When I discovered a glimpse of hope, I ran with that."

The "Any Man of Mine" singer underwent open-throat surgery and began to focus on strengthening her voice again. Had she not been able to pull through, she admits she would have been destroyed.

"It would have killed me not to be able to ever sing again," Twain says. "I wasn’t going to let my life be over if I wasn’t going to be able to sing again,  but I would have been very sad and I would have mourned that forever. But it is a great love of mine and a passion — that’s what got me back on stage again, because I could. Now I have more appreciation for it than ever."

Thankfully for Twain, her voice did come back — she made a triumphant return in 2017 with her most recent album, Now. More recently, Twain made a grand return to her Las Vegas stage, where she began her Let's Go! residency at the Zappos Theater last December.

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