Even though she is back on the road for her tour, Amy Grant says she's still recovering after aserious bike accidentnear her Nashville home in 2022.
In a new interview with E! News, the country singer revealed that she still has "issues with my short-term memory" and balance.
"My balance is still weird," she tells the outlet, adding she has joked about it to her audiences.
"You know, sometimes I walk around like I'm drunk, and you just have to laugh about all of it," she says. "I can't remember what I can't remember."
The bike accident, which left the singer unconscious for 10 minutes, caused a traumatic brain injury and memory loss. It also caused a cyst she hadn't known about in her throat to go "into hypergrowth," she says.
Grant, 63, had a five-hour long surgery to have it removed in which doctors cut open her throat.
"I actually had to learn to sing again," she tells E! of the January 2023 surgery.
Despite the cyst and the traumatic brain injury, Grant says she's doing great.
"I just felt like an old, beat-up car that went in and got a paint job and had the dents knocked out," she told E!.
Grant's comments echo the February 2023 interview she did with TODAY's Craig Melvin. At the time, she said that she felt "fantastic" — despite all her recent "trips to the shop."
"I feel fantastic," she said. "I mean, really from 2020 on, I feel like I had to, if I were a car, I’ve made a lotta trips to the shop. And I feel like I’m emerging. I went, ‘Oh man, I feel like a classic now.’ And actually sort of re-revved up in a really beautiful way."
What happened in Amy Grant's bike accident?
Grant was riding her bicycle with her friend near her Nashville, Tennessee, home when she hit a pothole. Though she was wearing a helmet, the singer sustained a serious brain injury as well as cuts and abrasions from the crash. Her rep told TODAY at the time that Grant was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center and stayed for a few days for treatment.
The singer was also ordered to postpone her upcoming shows.
She would later say that she had been knocked out for 10 minutes following the bike accident and it caused a cyst she hadn’t known about in her throat to go "into hypergrowth."
What throat issue did Amy Grant have?
In February 2023, Grant told TODAY that a voice coach had been one of the people who noticed her throat issue, initially.
“(I was) working with a vocalist and she said, ‘What is happening in your throat? Lean your head back,’” she told TODAY. “And I said, ‘I know. It’s like I’ve got an Adam’s apple that keeps getting bigger.’ Unbeknownst to me, I’d had a thyroglossal duct cyst.”
After her doctors discovered the cyst in her throat growing rapidly, they did a five-hour surgery in January 2023 to remove it.
“They asked me, ‘Hey we’re going into your throat, do you want a facelift?’” she laughed in the February 2024 interview with E! News. “And I said, ‘Dear god, no! I actually have to be onstage in X number of weeks.’”
She added that though she “didn’t ask for it” when she came out of surgery, her neck was just “a little tighter.”
What other health issues did Amy Grant have?
Grant previously had open heart surgery. In 2020, she went under the knife to fix a rare genetic condition called partial anomalous pulmonary venous return (PAPVR).
PAPVR occurs when some of the lung blood vessels (pulmonary veins) are attached to the wrong place in the heart, according toMayo Clinic.
In a September 2021 interview with Craig, she said that the incident had only strengthened her faith.
“I am so grateful,”Grant told Craig at the time. “As I’ve gotten older, I just say, ‘Wow, it changed everything when I believed that God designed me to be uniquely me.’ And I’m going to believe he designed you to be uniquely you.”
She added, “I’m sure there are so many things I don’t understand. But I’m just trusting that God, who holds everything in his hands, it’s not a surprise to him.”
