Amy Grant Says Her Health Scares 'Made Everything More Precious' (Exclusive)

Amy Grant is feeling great — and grateful — after facing two serious health scares in the past four years.

The Grammy-winning singer, 63, who underwent open heart surgery in 2020 and then sustained a brain injury in a bike crash in 2022, says the incidents "changed the way I look at life."

Grant, who is working with the American Heart Association on a new campaign for heart health, says that before she discovered she had issues with her own heart, "I always saw myself living well into my nineties. My great-grandmother lived to be 94. She was sharp in the mind," she says. "To realize something can happen that you never see coming, and it could be over...everything became more precious."

The "Baby Baby" singer only learned of her heart problem because the doctor taking care of her husband, singer Vince Gill, 67, who had been experiencing shortness of breath, suggested she get tested too. She joked, "after giving Vince the 'great' news, 'You're just fat and out of shape' — and Vince said, 'Tell me something I don't know!' — the doctor looked at me and said, 'I want to see you.'"

Testing revealed that she had a rare heart defect known as PAPVR (partial anomalous pulmonary venous return) in which some of the blood vessels of the lungs attach to the wrong place in the heart. The condition means the heart has to work harder and can cause breathing trouble, lung infections, swelling of the heart chambers or other serious heart issues. In a new PSA, Grant describes it as a "ticking time bomb in my chest."

Up to that point, Grant knew that her heart rate would be high if she exercised and thought she just needed to build stamina. "I just learned to push through because that's what women do," she says. "I was one of those women who's like, 'I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm the Energizer Bunny,' and then I just would've died. And I'm not ready to die."

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women, according to the AHA, causing one in three deaths among women each year.

Following her open heart surgery in June 2020, Grant says she renewed her commitment to keeping fit, starting a regular practice of swimming. "I was probably in the best shape I had been in in a long time, maybe 20 years," Grant says.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

And then, in July of 2022, while riding her bike in Nashville she hit a pothole. Despite wearing a helmet, she sustained a brain injury that left her with lingering memory issues for months.

"I would just say, 'What if I'm never all the way back?' Because my processing was so slow. I could be in the room with people, but I didn't have a comeback," she says.

But over time, Grant's memory has improved, and she says, "now I feel fully in control of all my capacity." She adds, "I write everything on a calendar. But whatever memory issues I have, I think are age appropriate. I'm about to be 64. So I'm just going, 'I'm right on time.'"

Since her health scares, her perspective has shifted, she says. "I'm finding a different balance between music and family and just trying to be a lot more involved, as my adult children will allow it," she says. Grant has three children from her first marriage to musician Gary Chapman, along with a daughter, Corrina Grant Gill, 23, whom she shares with Gill. Gill also has a daughter Jennifer Gill, from his first marriage.

"This has made us all look at each other with a kind of appreciation," says Grant, who begins her annual series of Christmas concerts with Gill in Nashville at the end of this month, the fourteenth year the couple has undertaken the holiday residency. "I think being together maybe was a little bit on autopilot, and it doesn't feel that way now."