Nanjiani opens up about wife’s illness, the inspiration for ‘The Big Sick’
LAST year, Pakistani-American actor Kumail Nanjiani released his first feature film, The Big Sick, to wide acclaim. It’s based on the real-life love story of Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon, who co-wrote the movie.
Eight months into dating Nanjiani, Gordon got sick and was placed in a medically induced coma. Nanjiani and her parents waited in the hospital as doctors scrambled to diagnose her as her organs began shutting down, which is depicted in the movie, along with the cultural challenges faced by the Pakistani-American couple.
This week Nanjiani posted to Twitter a photograph of the hospital visitor badge that he wrote his phone number on for Gordon’s parents, as they all waited nervously.
“Emily’s mom just found this,” he tweeted. “Certain objects have the power to pull you back. Wow.”
The comedian, who said he hadn’t seen the hospital badge in a decade, then opened up about Gordon’s hospital stay in a series of uncharacteristically candid tweets.
“Looking at it, I got pulled right back into that moment,” he tweeted. “And the strongest feeling I felt was this kind of fearful floating. Emily’s condition & disease at that point felt so big & unknowable.”
The days Gordon spent in a coma remains “the longest we’ve gone without speaking since the day we meet,” Nanjiani wrote.
One of the main issues - both in Gordon and Nanjiani’s actual life and in the movie they penned - was that doctors had no idea what was wrong with the young woman. Nanjiani desperately tried not to obsess about it.
“... You expend so much energy to not think about the one thing that’s unthinkable,” he said. “So much of your entire being is spent trying to not think of the worst case scenario. And every day was a new theory on what it was.”
“I remember the day they thought it was leukaemia,” he continued, adding that he “had a family member who had passed away from that disease.”
When a doctor told the family that Gordon likely had leukaemia, Nanjiani said, “I thought ‘Well, if it is that, at least we’ll get to talk to her again. Her parents will get to say goodbye.’ That was an actual thought I had.”
Eventually, doctors determined that Gordon suffers from adult-onset Still’s disease, an extremely rare form of arthritis that can shut down the body’s vital organs and lead to death. It’s found in one in 100,000 to 500,000 people in the general population, according to the International Foundation For Autoimmune Arthritis. “Basically, your organs can start getting inflamed as if they’re under attack and have an infection, but they’re not,” Gordon told the Hollywood Reporter in June. “Because I wasn’t diagnosed or being treated for it, it just kept getting worse and worse. My organs kept getting more and more inflamed until I had to be hospitalised.”
After her diagnosis, Gordon eventually was taken out of the coma and recovered. While her disease can be monitored and its symptoms kept at a bay, she has to focus on “self-care,” which includes getting enough sleep, eating healthy, not drinking too much alcohol and taking care to rest when she feels an episode coming on. She does all this with Nanjiani’s help.
“My parents call him my lion, and he really is,” Gordon told the Hollywood Reporter. “At times when I’m not great at self-care, he will force me to be good about it.” —