Grey’s Anatomy actress Camilla Luddington has been going through a real-life medical drama.
After searching for answers, Luddington was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease earlier this year, she said on Wednesday’s edition of the Call It What It Is podcast, which is cohosted by her Grey’s costar Jessica Capshaw.
“About two-and-a-half months ago — now still very recent — I had blood work,” said Luddington, who joined the show as Dr. Jo Wilson in 2012. “It came back, and my doctor was like, ‘Everything looks great except this one little thing. And I remember hearing the words autoimmune disease and thinking, ‘What the f—?’ And then being told that I had something called Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism and that it was very common.”
The Cleveland Clinic estimates that the disorder affects 5 in 100 people in the United States, and it is especially prevalent among women, who are 10 times more likely than males to suffer from it.
Camilla Luddington plays Dr. Jo Wilson on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.
Gilles Mingasson/ABC via Getty
Still, the actress was “a little freaked out” at first.
But then, “honestly I was relieved. I felt like I had the answer for something that I’ve been knowing is going on. And I have health anxiety, So there was a part of me that was like, ‘Am I gaslighting myself?'”
Her symptoms were very real, though. The condition causes the immune system to attack the thyroid, and what that looked like for Luddington was feeling “slothy,” which Luddington said she regularly jokes about on the podcast.
“What it can make you feel is tired and cold, which is really funny because Matt would make fun of me, because I’d have like 40 blankets on me at night,” she said of her husband, actor Matthew Allan. “It can make you foggy, depressed, you can have dry skin, your hair can thin.”
For the 41-year-old mother of two young children, she wondered if it was just the normal aging process.
“I thought, I have two kids, I’m in my 40s. This is what ‘the 40s’ is: You know, I have jobs to do, maybe I’m perimenopause,” she said. “It got to the point where, by 11 a.m., I felt like I had to chug Benadryl, and I needed to nap. It didn’t matter how much sleep I’d gotten the night before. There was no pushing through the day.”
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Luddington even stopped working out, which usually energized her, in case that was the culprit.
She scheduled an appointment for blood work, which had previously been cancelled because she was sick, when her husband did.
After being diagnosed, she said that she’s started medication and will return to her doctor every six weeks to monitor how it’s working.
Hear the full conversation above.
