Yolanda Hadid is determined to find a cure for Lyme disease
The 53-year-old television personality was diagnosed with infectious disease - which is spread to humans from ticks - in 2012, and has said that for a long time she would be in so much pain she "prayed that [she] would die” from the illness.
28 July 2017
She said: "Too many nights I found myself lying naked on the bathroom floor, the only relief being the cold tiles on my bare skin, wondering how much more pain I could take and how many more days, months, and years I could suffer … There were plenty of times when I thought that I wouldn't make it through the night alive, and others where I wished and prayed that I would die.”
And the ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ star - who has children Gigi, 22, Bella, 20, and Anwar, 18, with her ex-husband Mohamed Hadid
- will stop at nothing to find a cure for the debilitating disease, and hopes to do so as publicly as possible as she refuses to be “shamed into silence”.
Writing in an excerpt of her upcoming memoir ‘Believe Me: My Battle with the Invisible Disability of Lyme Disease’ which was obtained by the Daily Mail newspaper, Yolanda said: “I’m going to find a cure for this disease and nothing and nobody is going to stop me. I will not allow anyone to shut me up or shame me into silence, and I'm not going to rot away behind closed doors.”
And it isn’t just Yolanda who’s struggled with her illness either, as her eldest daughter and model Gigi previously spoke about how “hard”
it was to cope with her mother’s diagnosis.
She said: "You know it's hard, especially with something like Lyme disease, not a lot of people know about it, especially doctors so they don't really know how to help, medical wise.
"So it's really hard for me and my siblings to know how we could help, but I guess just being supportive is the best way we can do it."
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