Céline Dion on her health issues and plans for a comeback: 'I will sing again'

"When this whole thing started, if you put yourself in my shoes, I didn't have a [diagnosis]," says pop icon Céline Dion. 

It is spring in Las Vegas, and she's speaking to CBC News chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault in an exclusive English Canadian interview. The topic that brought them together is, of course, what she is referring to now: the health issues that went from benign annoyances to debilitating attacks that caused her career to come to a screeching halt.

"I was trying to, what, survive through this. I was trying to be brave. Because, all my life, I wanted to be the best of me."

The diagnosis Dion eventually received, and subsequently shared with the world in December 2022, was stiff-person syndrome (SPS) — a rare autoimmune disorder that inhibits the ability to move and, more importantly to Dion, use your voice. 

It was an earth-shattering discovery for the musician who's won five Grammys and 20 Juno awards. And after first rescheduling, then cancelling her planned Courage world tour in 2023, she stepped away somewhat from her public life — focusing on managing the symptoms of a disease without a cure.

This interview is part of the My Heart Will Go On singer's return — both ahead of a June 25 documentary, I Am: Céline Dion that details her life and health struggles, and as an overdue explanation and apology she feels she owes her fans.

Because while she publicly announced that she had been diagnosed with SPS less than two years ago, Dion revealed to CBC her own realization that her voice was beginning to falter happened years earlier. 

"At the beginning it was, totally, something light," she says, describing the 2008 Taking Chances world tour where she first started to lose control of the pitch of her voice — the tone at times shooting up in a way she compared to yodelling.

Those performances went alright: a mild issue written off as possibly a cold. But instead of improving, things quickly started to spiral.

"With the weeks and the months and the years, things started to get more, more often — every day, worse," she explains. "The body started to get rigid, not flexible, more spasm, more cramping."

What followed was a decade and a half of worsening symptoms, confused doctors, improvised workarounds and, she says, family obligations and tragedies that kept her from taking a moment to breathe.

As the muscle spasms, stiffness and pain typical of SPS worsened, Dion and her team devised strategies to hide their impact.

They lowered the key of certain songs, omitted other songs and, she says, she adjusted the way she sang — instead of the relaxed, powerful tone she was known for, she required more effort and a more nasal tone to reach the heights that once came easily. 

Meanwhile, she was seeing numerous specialists, including ear, nose, throat (ENT) doctors, who would examine her vocal chords and find no nodes or polyps, and send her on her way.