Céline Dion has shared footage of her suffering a torturous seven-minute seizure caused by her Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS).
The 56-year-old “My Heart Will Go On” singer was forced to stop performing following her 2022 diagnosis of the rare condition, and has now shown the astonishingly vulnerable footage in her new documentary “I Am: Céline Dion”, which details her battle with the condition, and premiered on Prime Video this week.
It shows the singer’s doctor conducting an evaluation as she had been experiencing spasms due to SPS, with sports medicine therapist Terrill Lobo saying in the documentary: “Part of the disease is that as soon as you go into a contraction, sometimes… the signal to release it, doesn’t understand, so it ends up just staying in a contracted position.”
After he gets Dion to lie down on a massage table, the musician keeps spasming, which Lobo warns could spark “a crisis”.
The Grammy-winning entertainer is then seen going into a severe, full-blown fit as the doctor calls in another member of his medical team to bring in Valium.
Dion can be heard moaning in agony as she shakes while face down, and when Lobo goes to lift her on her side, the singer starts whimpering and crying.
One more shocking moment in the scene shows Dion wide-eyed and unable to move on her own – but still conscious.
She then starts crying as the spasm continues to wrack her body and when Lobo asks her to try and “calm down”, the singer starts sobbing more loudly.
Dion is seen getting two doses of a nasal spray before she eventually starts to come out of the seizure.
Lobo says if she hadn’t recovered, she would have had to have been rushed to hospital.
The musician says after she recovers that the incidents make her feel “so embarrassed”.
She adds: “I don’t know how to express it, like, it’s just, you know, like, to not have control of yourself?”
Lobo says it was most likely triggered by her being in a music studio shortly before it started, with the lights probably leading to her brain being “overstimulated.”
Dion asks when he explains it: “Well, what am I gonna do? If I can’t get stimulated by what I love, and then I’m gonna go onstage and, like, you’re gonna put the pulse oximeter on me and you’re gonna turn me on my back?”
Lobo says: “It’s scary, I know. It’s hard. This is not the end of your journey – we all know that. But this is always that step on that journey.”
Dion has insisted she is determined to get back on stage despite her SPS, the diagnosis of which forced her to postpone her Las Vegas residency in October 2021 and cancel her North American tour months later.
* “I Am: Céline Dion” is currently streaming on Prime Video.