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Alec Baldwin has been struggling with Lyme disease for over 20 years, and the actor recently revealed just how much of an impact the illness has had on his life. Spending ample time in the Hamptons, Baldwin explained that he was bitten by a tick several years ago, which led to years of falling ill in August as an effect of Lyme.
Speaking to Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali as a guest on their podcast Hypochondriactor, Baldwin explained just how bad his symptoms were when they struck. “August of one summer I was standing on my friend's porch at night, and it was a cool evening - it wasn't a hot steamy evening - and I felt literally this wave go over my back and over my shoulders and kind of wrap around me like a chill, and I got just attacked. It came like someone snapped their fingers and put a spell on me."
The onset of the illness had the 63-year-old actor bedridden for days. “This thing just attacks me and I wound up laying in my bed for three days sweating through my sheets and just this horrible joint pain and soreness and exhausted. I couldn't even get up for like three days," he said. Baldwin also revealed that the same thing would happen each year like clockwork. “I had the same thing each August," he said. "I got bit, and then I had it again; the following August and I got bit again; and I had it the following August and it just kept coming back."
Chronic Lyme disease is an under-discussed issue that people struggle with but often goes undiagnosed by doctors, and Baldwin shared that he speculates he may be afflicted, but can’t say for sure. “It's super controversial whether it actually exists," Wali says of chronic Lyme disease. "This is the most common tick-borne disease in the United States. There's close to 300,000 people that get this every year and then many of those do not recover. This is a real phenomenon that's occurring. It sounds like a lot of people have gotten mansplained by the medical system about this."
Baldwin went on to note that he and his wife Hilaria Baldwin are now extremely cautious about their own children playing in the Hamptons, for fear of further tick bites. "My wife finds one tick on one of my kids and she's like, 'That's it. Hiking season is over.' She just terminates hiking season." From his own experience, Baldwin has become passionate about research into Lyme disease, and has helped raise money for the Bay Area Lyme Foundation with the hope that his children can grow up playing outside without fear of falling ill as he did.
