More than a decade after she was diagnosed with Lyme disease, Bella Hadid says she’s “finally healthy.” In an Instagram post on Sunday, the model wrote that she underwent “100+ days of Lyme, chronic disease and co-infection treatment” and now feels she can “truly” be herself “for the first time ever.”
“Almost 15 years of invisible suffering was all worth it if I’m able to, God willing, have a lifetime of spreading love from a full cup,” she wrote in a lengthy caption. The photos she shared — of lab results and selfies in which she’s wearing hospital gowns, hooked up to IVs, and getting blood drawn — show just how intense the process was. Still, Hadid said she tried to choose the most positive pictures because “as painful as this experience was, the outcome was the most enlightening experience of my life.”
Hadid; her mother, Yolanda; and her brother, Anwar, were all diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2012. Since then, Hadid has been open about living with the disease and learning to push through extreme fatigue, joint pain, and difficulty walking, among other symptoms. In an April TikTok video, she told her followers she was experiencing a severe flare-up caused by a tooth infection. Soon after, she took some time off from modeling to focus on her health, sparking tabloid speculation that she was in rehab when she was actually undergoing the treatment she documented on Instagram. “Living in this state, worsening with time and work while trying to make myself, my family and the people who support me, proud, had taken a toll on me in ways I can’t really explain,” she wrote in her post. “To be that sad and sick with the most blessings/privilege/opportunity/love around me was quite possibly the most confusing thing ever.”
Hadid reiterated that she now feels well and will be back at work when she’s ready. “I am okay and you do not have to worry,” she wrote. “I wouldn’t change anything for the world. If I had to go through all of this again, to get here, to this exact moment I’m in right now, with all of you, finally healthy, I would do it all again. It made me who I am today.”