USA TODAY International Edition
Yolanda Hadid learns about living with Lyme
The model and mom to Gigi and Bella reveals her struggle
If seeing is believing, where does that leave people whose pain is imperceptible?
In Believe Me: My Battle With the Invisible Disability of Lyme Disease (St. Martin’s Press), Yolanda Hadid, the former model and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, lays bare an illness that razes her insides and leaves little trace of its destruction.
Woven into her investigation of Lyme disease — caused by a bacterium carried by deer ticks — are indictments of our culture: The expectations heaped on women hanging on by a thread, the skepticism toward those who “appear” healthy and the assumption that suffering is in their heads.
Aided by co-writer Michele Bender, the matriarch to models Gigi, Bella and Anwar Hadid tells her story. Here are the highlights from the book:
1 HADID INITIALLY IGNORED HER BODY’S WARNINGS
From the age of 7, when she lost her father in a car accident, Hadid, 53, learned to view stoicism as strength. She carried that into adulthood, so when she started struggling with word retrieval and recall, she made excuses.
Dark circles began appearing under her eyes. Then came migraines and hair loss, which she hid with extensions. After a year of fighting brain fog, blurry vision, fatigue, joint pain, anxiety and insomnia, Hadid saw an internist. Another year — marked by misdiagnoses, emergency visits and a car accident — followed before she was diagnosed in 2012.
2 AFTER ANTIBIOTICS FAILED HER, HADID WENT DOWN A RABBIT HOLE
From a 150-pill-a-day protocol to stem cell therapy in a hotel basement in Tijuana to herbal enemas, Hadid tried dozens of treatments. And while she acknowledges how she had access to the best care and doctors who were able to identify her co-infections, the relief never seemed to last.
At one point, Hadid considered suicide. During a trip to Florida, she slipped into the ocean, pleading, “God … please carry my body away. I just want to disappear.” Yet the thought of her children — and finding a cure to spare Bella and Anwar, who were also diagnosed with Lyme — kept her afloat.
3 AS SHE FOUGHT FOR ANSWERS, HADID ALSO FOUGHT CYNICS
During her battle with Lyme, Hadid’s marriage to record producer David Foster broke down. Tensions between her and the
Housewives cast grew as members questioned how someone so sick could juggle a spot on TV.
Hadid maintains she needed the money to keep her independence, but that didn’t stop murmurs of Munchausen syndrome, a mental disorder in which a person feigns an illness to elicit medical care and sympathy.
Surrounded by skeptics, Hadid took refuge in her children and a close group of friends known as her “Lyme Squad.”
4 BEFORE HADID DREW UP A WILL ONE PROCEDURE
After discovering that silicone from leaked implants was fueling inflammation and blocking treatment for Lyme, Hadid underwent explant surgery (implant removal). Before the operation, she told her children where they could find her will.
Hadid was able to detox the remaining silicone. That moment was the beginning of her move toward remission.
It was a long road but, as Hadid writes, “as difficult as these past five years have been, I am so grateful that this journey has led to me living in the light.”