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Wendy Williams says that “life has completely changed” since she was forced to confront her hyperthyroidism, caused by her Graves’ disease diagnosis.
In a video message from the set of her talk show for the Graves’ Disease & Thyroid Foundation’s 2018 Patients and Family Conference, the 53-year-old said she’s changed her medication, the way she treats and looks at her condition, and even her style to ensure that she’s healthy and happy.
“I just thought the bats in my head are supposed to be how I’m feeling at this particular point in my life,” she said in the clip, obtained by Page Six. “So it wasn’t until I passed out on my own show that…Anyway, life has completely changed.”
Williams, who has always been a heel lover despite already being tall, admitted that she even had to turn in her stilettos (hopefully temporarily) to ensure that she wouldn’t have another incident of tripping and falling on her show, or out in the world. Of course, it was Williams fainting during the Halloween episode of her talk show in 2017 that put her — and everyone else — on alert about her health.
“So the doctors tell me it’s going to take at least six months, maybe a year, to level off my medication, which is why I always wear flats,” she said. “I’m not wearing heels and falling and tripping. Sometimes I feel off balance and everything like that.”
Williams said that she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease 19 years ago, and was doing just fine until she started making excuses for serious symptoms to focus more on work.
“I had the radioactive iodine [medication], taking my pill a day, minding my own business,” she said. “Then back in the fall or maybe around July of last year, I started feeling weird in the head but I’m thinking, ‘OK, this is maybe a casualty of menopause or we were ramping up for season nine of the ‘Wendy Show.'”
But as she shared in a previous interview with Good Morning America, she was fully able to take control of the situation when she stopped putting everything and everyone in front of it.
“We, as women, particularly if — we have families, you know, we’re taking care of children, we’re taking care of, you know, home, our husbands, we take care of everybody but ourselves,” she said. “And it’s really unfortunate. And that — that is something that has no socioeconomic thing to it. No matter what — no matter what the woman’s status is, it seems like we’re all in the same boat. I’m not doing that anymore.”
