“Even if one day I can no longer sing, my greatest happiness in life is being a mother. And even if I’m in a wheelchair, I’ll be a good mother and I’ll be fine!” she said, among other things, during the show, with her usual sense of humor, mimicking someone who is speed in a wheelchair. The 56-year-old artist made no secret of his rare illness, stiff person syndrome, a few days before the premiere of the documentary I am: Celine Dion on Amazon Prime.
Proximity
As with Kotb, we felt a closeness of the 56-year-old singer with Jean-Philippe Dion that we felt a little less with Arsenault. The details of her illness, the lies told to explain a condition that she did not initially understand, the medications that went so far as to put her life in danger, nothing was evaded. “If I brought a documentary filmmaker into my life, it’s because I didn’t want to let people say that I’m dead,” she said about a rumor that had circulated online shortly after the announcement of his illness.
“But it’s true that I could no longer sing, that I could no longer walk, I held on to all the chairs, to all the counters,” she says. It’s June 12, 2008 in Berlin, during the tour Taking Chances, that she started to feel these symptoms in her voice. What followed was nearly 17 years of unanswered panic after seeing tons of otolaryngologists who failed to diagnose any redness, polyps or nodules.
Since then, she has claimed tonsillitis, sinusitis or conjunctivitis to justify her absences from the stage. “I lied,” she says today. The director of the documentary I am: Celine DionIrene Taylor, would later declare to Jean-Philippe Dion that the singer had revealed to him that the obstacle she had hit was not so much illness as lying and that the pandemic had given her the opportunity to take a step back.
As with Kotb, we felt a closeness of the 56-year-old singer with Jean-Philippe Dion that we felt a little less with Arsenault.
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Valiums… and more
And Céline also took medication that she thought would help her. “Valiums?” asks Jean-Philippe Dion in reference to the confession she made to Hoda Kotb that a dose of 20 mg of valium was no longer even enough for her to go from her dressing room to the stage and that she was down to 90 mg per day at one point in her life.
“Valiums… and more…”, Céline Dion responds seriously to the host’s question. “I could have stopped breathing, I could have died… I decided to consult to stop my medication in a supervised manner,” she also admits, adding that the disease had advanced by two years while she did not have the appropriate medication.
“Even if one day I can no longer sing, my greatest happiness in life is being a mother. And even if I’m in a wheelchair, I’ll be a good mother and I’ll be fine!” she said, among other things, during the show.
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Therapists
The singer also admitted that she now has a physical therapist with her every day as well as a vocal therapist. “And it will be like this for the rest of my life,” she adds realistically. At the end of the interview, however, she indicated that she felt much better. “Oh my God! Oh my God! I wouldn’t be here otherwise!”, she continues before repeating, as she had said during her two previous interviews, that she was going to return to the stage one day.
“It’s going to happen… I don’t have the exact date though. And maybe I won’t be able to do it five evenings a week,” she adds before telling the host that the combative Céline we know is far from gone. “She, you’re stuck with it!”, she says with a laugh before adding that she sincerely hopes that a drug will one day be discovered to cure her illness, which can however for the moment be treated with various medications. and therapies.
