Keala Settle killed it on the Oscars stage last year, singing “This is Me.” The singer blew everyone away and brought the whole audience to their feet. But now, she recently revealed that only a week before she hit the stage, she’d suffered a mini-stroke. 

She lost half of her body’s motor functions, and doctors diagnosed her with a rare cerebrovascular disorder known as Moyamoya disease. It’s been six months since she underwent a 10-hour double-bypass brain surgery to correct the problem, and now she is speaking out to People magazine about her health. 

“It’s shifted me in ways I’m still understanding,” Keala said. “The way that I look at the world is so completely different. I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been; I can find the joy in things I never could. This truly gave me another lease on life.”

As People reports, the singer’s trouble first appeared when she went on a non-stop worldwide promotional tour for The Greatest Showman and its chart-topping soundtrack, which left her immune system compromised: “I was completely rundown,” she says. “I had gotten food poisoning in Tokyo, I was fighting a cold. I barely had anything left to give.”

During rehearsal for the Oscars performance, she said she felt a shooting pain in her soul and noticed the right side of her body went completely numb. 

“It was like someone cracked an egg on the top of my head and then drew a line on my body, turning one half off,” she recalls. “My body started drooping immediately. I tried to put my hands up to my face, but I could only move my left arm. I couldn’t talk because part of my tongue was immobile. I tried to stand, but there was nothing.”

“I was panicked,” she continues. “I let out this wail because I was so scared and the room went silent. All I could figure out how to say was ‘Help.’”

Settle had suffered from a transient ischemic attack (TIA), a “mini-stroke” that produces similar symptoms of a larger stroke, often as a warning of impending trouble.

Read more at People.