Having battled cancer as a teenager, singer Delta Goodrem is no stranger to adversity, but when a routine operation went horribly wrong, she was left unable even to form words. She tells Julia Llewellyn Smith what she had to go through to recover her voice When Australian pop star Delta Goodrem put a video on Twitter last summer, most people thought they knew what to expect – a new song maybe, or news about her long-term role as a judge on The Voice Australia. Instead, after a brief shot of Delta, 36, in a garden, the screen went black then cut to footage from late 2018 of Delta in bed with a tube up her nose, eyes filled with sadness. Captions explained that she’d woken from surgery to remove a salivary gland unable to control her speech as complications had paralysed a nerve in her tongue. Delta was then seen crying. ‘I don’t want to go out,’ she lisped, her voice altered. ‘I’m embarrassed. I’m just trying to stay positive. I’m trying to decide if this is getting better. It doesn’t feel like it.’ Shocked viewers learned it’s impossible to predict if a damaged nerve will ever recover, then saw clips of Delta having speech therapy – learning how to speak again.