What Dolly Parton Said About Her Health Battle Before Death

Less than two weeks before, the "Jolene" singer also missed an event at her Dollywood theme park due to complications from a kidney stone.

"Turned out it’d given me an infection," Parton shared in a video to the audience, "and the doctor said, 'You don’t need to be traveling right this minute, so you need a few days to get better.'"

Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images

"It's going to take me a little while before I'm up to stage performance level," she noted, "because some of the meds and treatments make me a little bit swimmy-headed, as my grandma used to say."

However, Parton shared, "This thing for me is like an old classic car that once restored, can be better than ever."

And she was more than barely gettin' by when she turned up to open Dolly's Tennessean Travel Stop this past June. 

"You know, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to manage something like this," she explained to People Aug. 21. "Back in the early ’80s, I was down for several months with female issues, and I was struggling with my weight at the time too, so it’s not like I haven’t been through hard times with my health."

It was just that she'd put off dealing with certain issues while tending to husband Carl Dean before his March 2025 death.

"I didn’t take care of myself," she acknowledged on Instagram last October after younger sister Freida Parton mentioned she'd been "up all night praying" for her sibling, "so I let a lot of things go that I should’ve been taking care of."

On top of that, she added during a March appearance at her Dollywood theme park, "I just kind of got worn down and worn out, grieving over Carl and a lot of other little things going on."

Part of building herself up physically, emotionally and spiritually involved rediscovering her inspiration for writing.

"Several things I’ve wanted to start, but I can’t do it," she lamented on Khloe Kardashian’s Khloé in Wonder Land podcast last June. "I will later, but I’m just coming up with such wonderful, beautiful ideas. But I think I won’t finish it."

Parton noted she didn’t want the grief that would surface during the songwriting process to affect her other work, adding, "I can’t do it right now, because I got so many other things and I can’t afford the luxury of getting that emotional right now."

The "I Will Always Love You" singer had also opened up about her health in her 2017 book Dolly on Dolly: Interviews and Encounters with Dolly Parton, detailing her struggles with eating issues and endometriosis in her 30s.

"I was working hard, and underneath I was a pile of personal and emotional problems," she shared. "All at once I fell apart. It was stomach problems and female problems—all over health problems actually."

Parton eventually had a partial hysterectomy, which was later followed by binge eating, consuming excessive alcohol and even contemplating suicide before she got better.

"I'm grateful it happened when I was still young enough to bounce back," Parton explained. "I went through a dark time until I made myself snap out of it."

And there's no doubt her fans will always love her. Read on to look back at Parton's life through the years.