It was terrible. 2012, no voice. I would fall to my knees and look up at God and say, 'Oh, man, this is tough. I don't know how to be a person.' And finally, I would sing some shows where the voice crapped out. There were people in the audience. I did my best. I saw that there was lots of love and support.

Singing 'Family Tradition' with Hank Jr. was a pee-your-pants moment. Hank comes over while I'm singing and puts his arm around me, and my knees nearly buckled. You can put off the fact that this is reality, but when he came over, there was just no denying. I just lost cabin pressure.

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.

At my wedding, I was dancing so furiously that I fell hard on my kneecaps. The next morning, my knees were so swollen that I had to get a wheelchair at the airport to go on my honeymoon.

With Alexander's cancer, I was definitely brought to my knees for the first time because of the fear factor.