THE POWER OF Celine

SHE WAS DIAGNOSED WITH STIFF-PERSON SYNDROME AFTER 17 YEARS OF DEBILITATING SYMPTOMS. HOW THE SUPERSTAR HAS FOUND STRENGTH IN HER SONS AND IS FIGHTING TO GET BACK ONSTAGE

- MELODY CHIU

Céline Dion felt the walls closing in. As she headed to a preshow fan meet and greet, 'suddenly I started to feel the corrido getting narrower and narrower,' she recalls of the scar experience that happened years ago during her second Caesars Palace concert residency, which drew more than 2 million fans during its eight-year run from 2011 to 2019. "I'm holding on to the wall, and I'm like, 'What is happening?"" The superstar sat for a moment, assuming she had a drop in blood sugar and downed an orange juice. Then, as she has done all her life, she insisted the show must go on. "I said, 'The people have been waiting!"" But what felt to Dion like 10 minutes actually had been two hours. "They said, 'Céline, the show has been canceled. People are gone.""

The "hole" in her memory, as Dion, 56, describes it now over a Zoom call from her home in Las Vegas, was just one of many mysterious and increasingly concerning symptoms she began privately grappling with in the mid-2000s. As she recorded multiple albums and performed back-to-back soldout tours and residencies, the five-time Grammy winner did everything she could to power through muscle spasms in her throat and feet, difficulty breathing and walking, vision issues and, most severely, "crisis" episodes during which her body became stiff as a board as she endured excruciating pain. "I was going down, down, down. It took my whole life. But it's like if my kids are Rollerblading, for example, and one of their ankles is hurting. They don't want to tell me because I'm going to say, 'Well, take a break from Rollerblading," she explains. "I didn't want to stop. I wanted to stay onstage. I wanted to be brave instead of smart. That was wrong."