Yolanda Hadid Reveals In New Memoir, Lyme Disease Almost Drove Her To Commit Suicide

Yolanda Hadid’s five-year-long battle with Lyme disease was as much a mental and emotional one as it was physical.

Hadid, 53, reveals she once contemplated suicide because of the disease in her new memoir, Believe Me: My Battle with the Invisibility of Lyme Disease. At one point, the severity of her illness caused her to be bedridden for 22 hours a day. “I’m such a fighter, but I had to surrender,” she tells People.

Two years after her diagnosis, Hadid was on a trip to Florida with her recently divorced husband, David Foster. “I take off my clothes and slip into the dark blue ocean, which is cool and comforting,” she writes in her book. “The waves gently wash over my naked body, and I can feel the current tugging at me.

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“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.”

And that is the moment that sparked a harrowing idea. “God please just take me away in a wave,” Hadid writes. “I can’t live like this one more day. Please carry my body away. I just want to disappear.

“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.”

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Ultimately, however, her resolve to find a cure has left her in a better state as Hadid is in what “feels like remission.”

“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 says. “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.”

The former “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star was diagnosed with severe, chronic neurological Lyme disease in 2012. Despite medication, her condition drastically got worse and symptoms like joint pain, exhaustion, insomnia and anxiety plagued her every day.