In 2004, reality star Kelly Osbourne was bitten by a tick while attending her dad Ozzy Osbourne’s outdoor birthday party. For a decade after, she suffered from a sore throat, stomachaches, and eventually a seizure that led to an epilepsy diagnosis.
“The doctors kept changing my prescription, trying to get the dosage right, and it turned me into a zombie,” she wrote in her book excerpt published in US Weekly. “You know in movies where a mental patient sits in a rocking chair in a cardigan and nightgown and stares at a wall all day? That was me.”
At her wit’s end, she turned to an alternative practitioner. “I had started entering my symptoms into online quizzes, and the results kept coming back Lyme disease,” she wrote, adding that for the first time, she felt someone listened to her. “I got tested. The results were positive: I had stage III neurological Lyme disease. I was relieved to finally know what was going on, but I was also scared s—tless.”
From the experience, Osbourne shared some takeaways: “I’ve learned to advocate for myself when it comes to my health, and I trust my intuition. If I think something is wrong, I refuse to let anyone dismiss it.”