In PEOPLE’s latest cover story, the superstar opens up about her fight to perform again, staying strong for her sons, and inspiring others with a new documentary.

Céline Dion felt the walls closing in.

As she headed to a pre-show fan meet and greet, “suddenly I started to feel the corridor getting narrower and narrower,” she recalls exclusively to PEOPLE in its latest cover story of the terrifying experience that happened during her second Caesars Palace concert residency, which drew more than two million fans during its eight-year-run from 2011-2019. “I’m holding onto the wall, and I’m like, ‘What is happening?’”

The superstar sat for a moment, assumed she had a drop in blood sugar, and downed an orange juice. Then, as she has done all her life, insisted the show must go on.

“I said, ‘The people have been waiting!’” remembers Dion, who lifts the veil on the last few years of her life — during which she rarely left her house amid her ongoing fight with stiff-person syndrome — in a revealing new documentary, I Am: Celine Dion (streaming globally June 25 on Prime Video).

But what felt to the singer like 10 minutes actually had been two hours: “They said, ‘Céline, the show has been canceled. People are gone.’”

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