Yolanda Hadid Reveals Her Struggle With Lyme Disease Made Her Consider Suicide

For Yolanda Hadid, Lyme disease isn’t just something that has made the last five years of her life incredibly difficult — it also made her consider ending her own life.

In an interview with People magazine, Hadid discusses the impact the chronic neurological disease had on not only her physical health, but also mental health. She said that even though she was given antibiotics, her health deteriorated until the joint pain, exhaustion and insomnia made it difficult for her to perform routine tasks like answering an email or going to the bathroom.

More:Yolanda Hadid May Have Finally Put Her Lyme Disease Behind Her, Once & for All

Eventually, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star had to spend 22 hours each day in bed.

“I’m such a fighter, but I had to surrender,” she tells People.

But in 2014, two years after her diagnosis with Lyme disease, Hadid says she thought about suicide while on a trip to Florida with then-husband David Foster.

“I take off my clothes and slip into the dark blue ocean, which is cool and comforting,” she writes in her new memoir Believe Me: My Battle with the Invisibility of Lyme Disease out Sept. 12. “The waves gently wash over my naked body, and I can feel the current tugging at me. Tears pour out of my eyes, roll across my cheeks, and meld with the salt water as I try to still my mind to become one with the water’s ebb and flow.”

More: Yolanda Foster Reveals Her Children Have Lyme Disease Too

Hadid tells People that at that point, the pain just got to be too much to handle.

“God please just take me away in a wave. I can’t live like this one more day. Please carry my body away. I just want to disappear,” she writes in her book. “My next thought is a clear image of my three children. It shifts my consciousness immediately and that’s the only thing that keeps me from letting myself drift and drown.”

But now, three years later, Hadid is in what she says “feels like remission” from Lyme disease, and is determined to regain her health and strength, focus on her family and find a cure for the condition that has been rampant all summer across the United States.

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“As difficult as these past five years have been, I am so grateful that this journey has led me to living in the light,” she tells People. “I have had it all and lost it all, only to realize that less is more, money can’t buy you health or happiness, and one day at a time is good enough.”