If Celine Dion told her audience about her rigid person syndrome, a rare neurological disease, it was because she could no longer keep it a secret. This is what the Quebec star explains in a new excerpt from an interview, scheduled for this Tuesday, June 11, on the American network NBC.
“I couldn’t do it anymore. What could I say? (…) We didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t take the time. I should have stopped, I should have taken the time to understand.”
Years of uncertainty
It wasn’t until December 2022, when she was forced to cancel the final dates of her world tour after multiple postponements, that the superstar revealed to the world that she was suffering from this rare neurological disease. However, the first symptoms of it were felt in 2008, during his Taking Chances World Tour.
However, Celine Dion ended this world tour, followed by a 7-year residency in Las Vegas and several additional tours, before noticing new symptoms, as he confided to Vogue a few weeks ago. Not to mention the health problems of her husband René Angélil, who died from throat cancer in 2016.
“For 17 years”
“My husband was fighting to save his life,” she confesses in the new excerpt from her interview with NBC. “I had to raise my children, hide, be a heroine, feeling all the time that my body was abandoning me (…) And lying, for me, was a burden too heavy to bear. Lying to the people who led me to where I am today, I was no longer able to do it.”
“She (has been sick) for 17 years and didn’t know what was happening,” explained journalist Hoda Kotb, in charge of the interview, on NBC’s Today program after the broadcast of this new excerpt. She “was worried: her voice had gone, her body was failing her, (…) but she is already on the way to recovery.”
According American Institutes of Health (NIH), stiff man syndrome is a rare neurological disorder with features of an autoimmune disease.
It is characterized by “a fluctuating stiffness of the muscles of the trunk and extremities and an increased sensitivity to external stimuli such as noise, touch, emotional discomfort… which can trigger muscle spasms.”
Inside the documentary I am: Celine Dionwhich will air on Prime Video starting June 25, the singer of Why do you still love me? He will tell his daily fight against this disease.
Source: BFM TV
