Céline Dion Shares Scary Footage of Stiff-Person Syndrome Episode

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Céline Dion isn’t hiding her pain in the new documentary “I Am: Céline Dion.”

The doc gives an intimate look at Dion’s life with stiff-person syndrome (SPS), even including footage of a medical episode.

Before the harrowing scene, Dion tells her sports medicine therapist Terrill Lobo that she had a foot spasm after a recording session of her song “Love Again.”

Lobo noted, “Part of the disease is that as soon as you go into a contraction, sometimes… the signal to release it doesn’t understand.” Which is why her foot ends up staying in a contracted position.”

As Lobo attempts to relax the muscles in her foot, he tells the camera, “This gives us an indication that her body, her brain right now is overstimulated. And there’s something going on and she keeps spasming. That could lead to a crisis.”

During the 10-minute ordeal, Céline is seen whimpering and crying while she is in pain and unable to move her body.

Dion’s head is seen shaking as she lies on a massage table face down, appearing to suffer from a seizure.

A helpless Céline is given nasal spray and turned on her side as she goes through a spasm.

A medical professional is heard asking Dion to squeeze his hand if she can.

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While her vitals are being checked, tears are seen streaming down Dion’s face as she is unable to talk.

When her body starts to loosen up, Lobo comments, “It’s sounding like she’s coming out. And if she goes back into a spasm, then we’ll do a 9-1-1.”

Dion is eventually able to sit upright and is covered with a blanket.

She shares, “Every time something like this happens, it makes you feel so embarrassed and so, like, I don’t how to express it, it’s just… you know, like to not have control of yourself…”

The documentary’s director, Irene Taylor, recently opened up to “Today” about how she felt filming the scene, saying, “It was the most extraordinarily uncomfortable moment in my life, as a filmmaker but also as a mother, as a fellow human, because I didn’t know what was happening.”

Taylor added, “I had this uncertainty whether to keep filming or not. But [Céline] gave me the strength to just keep going. We had been filming together for many months at that point, so she had really trained me, ‘Just keep going. If I have to stop you, I’ll stop you.'”

“Her body was enduring something that was unimaginable, and I wasn’t sure if she was aware of it,” Taylor noted. “I wasn’t sure if she was going to survive it. It’s really hard to even sit next to her and talk out loud about it because it was very intense.”

Dion’s physician Dr. Amanda Piquet also weighed in on what happened, saying, “That anxiety, that panic, that continued spasm that was not breaking then very quickly triggered just a complete, whole-body spasm.”

“It’s not a seizure,” Piquet pointed out. “This is a spasm that is occurring, and patients are aware of what’s going on. There’s a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of panic, your adrenaline’s rushing.”

“I Am: Céline Dion” is streaming on Amazon Prime.