At one point, Céline Dion’s rare neurological and autoimmune disease became so bad that she was taking near-lethal doses of Valium to cope.
In a new one-hour primetime NBC special from Tuesday night, Dion told Hoda Kotb that she was taking up to 90 milligrams of the medication to alleviate her anxiety, seizures, and muscle spasms she experienced due to Stiff Person Syndrome.
“I did not know, honestly, that it could kill me. I would take, for example before a performance, 20 milligrams of Valium, and then just walking from my dressing room to backstage—it was gone,” Dion said, describing how the medication offered her immediate reprieve, per Billboard.
“At one point, the thing is, that my body got used to it at 20 and 30 and 40 [milligrams] until it went up,” she added. “And I needed that. It was relaxing my whole body. For two weeks, for a month, the show would go on… but then you get used to [and] it doesn’t work anymore.”
She revealed that she was taking more than twice the recommended daily dose, which “could have been fatal.” She didn’t cut back on her valium intake until the COVID-19 pandemic when she could step away from the spotlight and focus on her health.
“I stopped everything with the help of doctors,” she explained. “I was weaning off all the meds, and especially the bad ones. I stopped everything because it stopped working.”
Her symptoms became worse after she was weaned off the drugs. She hasn’t performed since March 2020, and only revealed her diagnosis in December 2022, though she has struggled with SPS for almost 20 years.
During the pandemic, she also started working on her forthcoming Prime Video documentary, I Am: Celine Dion, which is set to arrive on June 25. In the doc, she makes a promise to her fans that she will perform again.
“If I can’t run, I’ll walk,” she says in the film. “If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl… I won’t stop.”
