Nashville-based Christian singer Natalie Grant says she is now fully healed after a fall led to internal bleeding and emergency surgery, an ordeal she’s now using to urge fans to pay closer attention to their bodies.
Grant, 54, told Fox News Digital the incident happened after she and her husband helped move their daughter into a college dorm room. The family went out to dinner to celebrate, and on the walk there, Grant’s foot caught on a brick, sending her to the ground.
“I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I broke a rib’ or ‘Man, that’s gonna leave a bruise’ or ‘I kind of knocked the wind out of me,'” she said. “But then I got up and I kept walking to dinner. I’m like, I’m sore, but I’m gonna be okay.”
She pushed through the pain to stay at dinner with her family, not wanting to miss the celebration. “I was in pain, but I didn’t want to miss the moment,” she said. “We are celebrating the fact that she has finished college, and we are going to dinner together, and we’re going to make this memory.”
It wasn’t until later that Grant realized something was seriously wrong. “I kind of like hurting and limping and not able to fully eat my meal. And I was, like, I don’t think I can ignore this anymore,” she said.
Once she understood she was bleeding internally, she went to the emergency room. “They were like your bladder could rupture, because my kidney was bleeding, and I wasn’t able to pass urine,” she said. Doctors were initially confused about the cause of her symptoms, she said, and the severity of her condition only became clear after she was admitted to the ICU.
“I had a catheter so you could see the blood kept filling. I wouldn’t stop bleeding, and I think that’s when they were like we’ve got to get you in for surgery and figure out what’s going on,” Grant said. She added that doctors told her getting to the hospital quickly, rather than waiting to travel to a larger facility, likely prevented her bladder from rupturing.
Even in pain, Grant said her thoughts turned to her children — her daughter who was with her in the hospital and “faints at the sight of blood,” and her other two daughters back home in Nashville. “As moms, we’re always concerned about everybody around us,” she said.
Grant is encouraging her fans to take warning signs from their bodies seriously. “God created our body in such a way that it gives us signs,” she said, adding that those signals too often go ignored “until it’s too late.”
Months later, Grant says she’s fully recovered — and discovered along the way that she had also broken a rib in the fall, which she says turned out to be the most painful part of the whole ordeal.
“I just last week had my final cystoscopy which checked inside my kidney and my bladder and everything looks fantastic. It’s 100 percent healed,” she said. “You actually can see a scar from where it was… It’s all healed, we still have the scar, but it’s healed.” She said a follow-up ultrasound confirmed everything internally is back to normal. “I thank God because that could have gone 100 different directions. But I’m very, very grateful for good medical care and for the faithfulness of God took care of me.”
Honoring Dolly Parton in Nashville
Grant’s health scare came not long before she paid tribute to Dolly Parton at the 57th Annual GMA Dove Awards, held Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena and hosted by Tauren Wells.
Grant said putting together the tribute required careful thought about how to honor Parton’s legacy beyond her best-known hits. “I’m not gonna sing nine to five or some of her greatest hits, like how do we make this work?” she said.
She said the most emotional moment of the planning process came when she found footage of Parton singing “How Great Thou Art.”
“This is the anchor of her, the anchor of who she was, was the songs of the faith. And I think that that was really beautiful to get to tell that part of her story,” Grant said.
