After supermodel Bella Hadid posted alarming photos of herself hooked up to medical equipment, her mother said Thursday that watching her daughter struggle with Lyme disease “has cut the deepest core of hopelessness inside me.”
Bella Hadid on Wednesday posted a collection of photos to Instagram with the caption, “I’m sorry I always go MIA I love you guys.” Many of the photos appear to show her in emotional distress while hooked up to IVs and machines in a medical office.
Her mother, onetime reality-TV figure Yolanda Hadid, posted an Instagram picture of herself hugging her ill daughter, who appears to be in a hospital room.
“As you will understand watching my Bella struggle in silence, has cut the deepest core of hopelessness inside me,” former “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” cast member Yolanda Hadid wrote. “The invisible disability of chronic neurological Lyme disease is hard to explain or understand for anyone.”
The elder Hadid, 61, praised her 28-year-old daughter’s fight.
“You are relentless and courageous. No child is suppose to suffer in their body with an incurable chronic disease,” Yolanda Hadid said.
“I admire your bravery and your willingness to keep fighting for health despite the failing protocols and countless setbacks you have faced. There simply aren’t words big enough for the darkness, the pain, and the unknown hell you’ve lived through since your diagnosis in 2013.”
Tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans are treated each year for Lyme disease, a bacterial infection often spread from tick bites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But the reason that an infection can have a long-term impact — with symptoms such as fever, headache, fatigue and skin rash — has not been established.
The CDC has gone as far as to say it “discourages use of the term Chronic Lyme Disease because it implies that prolonged symptoms are caused by an ongoing bacterial infection when, in fact, the cause is not currently known.”
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