Shania Twain Supports Celine Dion Amid Health Struggles, Compares Stiff Person Syndrome to Her Lyme Disease
Shania Twain is wishing fellow vocalist Celine Dion the best as the 55-year-old fellow Canadian struggles with Stiff Person Syndrome.
Twain opens up to Billboard about her admiration for the longtime performer, saying, "I’m such a fan of Celine’s voice. She’s a one-of-a-kind, extraordinary vocalist and entertainer."
While the singers have crossed paths through the years, 57-year-old Twain says that she hasn't recently connected with the "My Heart Will Go On" vocalist.
"I hope to be able to connect with her at some point," she shares. "I think it’s gotta be so difficult, and I know — only speaking from my experience — how horrifying it is to think that something is preventing you from singing, or interfering with that joy in your life. So I just pray that she is able to overcome it and she will be up there [on stage] singing for us all again."
In December, Dion first announced her diagnosis with Stiff Person Syndrome, which is "a rare disorder of motor function characterized by involuntary stiffness of axial muscles and superimposed painful muscle spasms, which are often induced by startle or emotional stimuli," according to the Mayo Clinic.
Earlier this month, Dion's sister, Claudette, gave an update on the GRAMMY winner's health in an interview with Le Journal de Montreal. She shared that their sister, Linda, moved into the singer's home, where she also lives with her three sons, René-Charles, Eddy, and Nelson, to aid in her care.
"When I call her and she's busy, I speak to my sister Linda who lives with her and tells me that she's working hard. She's listening to the top researchers in the field of this rare disease as much as possible," Claudette expressed, adding that medical professionals have yet to find a medication that truly works for her sister's rare neurological disorder.
"I honestly think that she mostly needs to rest. She always goes above and beyond, she always tries to be the best and top of her game. At one point, your heart and your body are trying to tell you something. It's important to listen to it," she added of her sister's decision to step away from performing. "It's innate to her, she's disciplined in every area of her life. We can't find any medicine that works, but having hope is important."
As for Twain, she has been open about her health struggles that briefly kept her from performing. In 2011, she had open-throat surgery to combat nerve damage she had after contracting Lyme disease while horseback riding in 2003. According to the Mayo Clinic, Lyme disease "is an illness caused by borrelia bacteria. Humans usually get Lyme disease from the bite of a tick carrying the bacteria."
"After I had the surgery, I was petrified to make a sound. I didn't know what was going to come out," she told InStyle earlier this year. "It did scare me, but I just had to take a leap and make a sound. And I was so excited about what came out. It was a connection to the vocal cords, and it came out very easily. I was really, really, really excited."
In September, Twain opened up to ET about how music got her through her darkest times, from her health struggles to her 2010 divorce from Robert "Mutt" Lange, all of which was covered in her Netflix documentary, Not Just a Girl.
"Anywhere where there was a personal crisis that created a shift in my career was included as part of that explanation," she shared. "The obvious ones being, first of all, the poverty in my life, which was really a huge part of my musical development and how that developed in my life, and also being very isolated with that... The death of my parents, which was a crossroads of, 'Do I quit altogether, get a real job, then be able to feed the kids and survive?'"
"The next one was losing my voice through... getting a divorce," Twain added. "... They were sort of happening simultaneously, both very devastating, obviously, to my career, both directly affecting my career and the changes and the directions it would take."
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