The health issue arose in the 1990s, while he was also divorcing his first wife, Brenda Harvey, and caring for his elderly father, who died in 1990. At the time, his illness was unknown, and the surgeries were an attempt to cure him.
“You don’t want anyone messing around down there,” he recently told People Magazine. ” This is your soul.”
When doctors told him that he might never be able to sing again because of the disease, he declared on the US news program 20/20 in 2006 that “it was the end of the world.”
