Ally Hilfiger’s Lyme Disease Story: Healing With Integrative Medicine After Landing in a Psych Ward
Channel: WellBe by Adrienne Nolan-Smith getwellbe
Date: 2017-11-14

Inspiration Episode #8
Read more about her story here https://getwellbe.com/inspiration/ally-hilfiger-chronic-lyme

Imagine suffering from range of ailments that totally controlled your childhood and then having a psychotic breakdown at 18 that led to institutionalization. For Ally Hilfiger, now 32, that was the reality of the bulk of her childhood. When she was 7, Hilfiger was bitten by a tick, but not diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease until 19. For all those years in between, she had to deal with severe fatigue, joint pain, difficulty retaining information, fainting spells, shooting pains, migraines, and serious anxiety attacks. No one could figure out what was causing her physical and neurological complications.

When she was filming for her MTV reality show, “Rich Girls,” Hilfiger’s decreasing ability to process information and retrieve words increased her anxiety and led to a two-month psychotic episode. Desperate, her dad, fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger, had her taken to a mental institution. Hilfiger talked to WellBe about waking up in a psychiatric ward and the psychiatrist who saw through her symptoms and pointed her toward her eventual chronic Lyme diagnosis.

After being diagnosed, Hilfiger was on and off of antibiotics for seven years—“It really did a number on my body and my gut and no one told me,” she told WellBe. Her life turned into a vicious cycle of feeling better on powerful drugs, but then having symptoms flare up intensely. Hilfiger tried a number of different styles of medicine and therapies but ended up in the hospital with a 48-hour migraine, where doctors discovered  she had a brain aneurysm. That was a defining moment for Hilfiger’s path to recovering from chronic Lyme— “I knew I had to make some major, major changes,” she told WellBe. She and her now-husband moved to the Caribbean for three months, with the focus on keeping her toxicity levels low by removing stress, eating clean, and focusing on positive energy.

In 2016, Hilfiger released her memoir, “Bite Me: How Lyme Disease Stole My Childhood, Made Me Crazy, and Almost Killed Me” and is now dedicated to educating the public on chronic Lyme disease.
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