At some point in 2008, while on the road with her Taking Chances world tour—one of the highest-grossing shows of that decade— Celine Dion remembers feeling something wasn’t quite right. “Quite rapidly, I was having difficulty controlling my voice,” Dion tells me over Zoom from her home in Las Vegas, perched on a sofa in a pair of tropical-leaf-print pajamas. “It would go really high, and then it would spasm.
So the first thing you do as a singer? Well, you go straight to the ENT.” With no clear answers from her doctors—“they looked at [my vocal cords] from every angle, and they said it was pristine,” she recalls—she just kept pushing through and finished the tour. Then she completed another Vegas residency.
Then five more tours. Somewhere along the way, she also began experiencing bouts of muscle stiffness. “I started having a hard time walking.
I was holding on to things.” It wasn’t until 2020, when COVID forced her to slow down, that Dion finally reckoned with the mysterious health concerns that had been a recurring part of her life for more than a decade. “When the pandemic arrived, I said to myself, The universe makes no mistakes, and I will take this time—this opportunity—to search,” says Dion.
“After years and years of playing hide-and-seek with myself, with my friends, with my family, with my kids...
.” She pauses, visibly emotional. “I no longer wanted to be brave.
I had tried as long as I could. It was time for me to be smart..
