Yolanda Hadid "wanted to die" when she was diagnosed with Lyme disease.
The 53-year-old television personality has revealed she suffered so much with the neurological condition – which is a bacterial infection spread to humans by infected ticks – after her diagnoses in 2014, and says the only reason she fought through her feelings of "hopelessness" was because of her three children Gigi, 22, Bella, 20, and Anwar, 18.
She said: "I just was hopeless and didn’t see how I was going to get out of the dark hole. I wanted to die, but the next second, I looked at a picture of my sweet kids. They are my reason for fighting."
Yolanda, whose two youngest children Bella and Anwar are also fighting the disease, is pushing to find a cure for Lyme so she can give her brood the "life they deserve".
The ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ star – who has her children with former husband Mohamed Hadid – added: "My greatest gift would be if I can find the cure before I leave this planet, so they can live a life they deserve."
The blonde beauty also admits the first step to her recovery was "surrendering" to the disease, as she had to learn how adapt to her condition.
She said: "You know, you just have to surrender. I just had to surrender, like the first year, I fought it every day and I would be miserable about being miserable. At some point you just learn to surrender to your path. This obviously was my path for five years and the healing clock is, you know, the universe’s time and not on my time.
"So it was a big lesson in learning to be patient and learning to be disciplined. I just found this inner strength that I never knew I had and the will to live and that stuck me through it."
And since accepting her condition, Yolanda has been able to better understand how to help her children through their own struggle.
Speaking to Us Weekly magazine, she said: "I know the treatments, I know what they need and I can support them because I get what they’re feeling. That’s really the bottom line of fighting a disease like this is you don’t get it until you get it, so you know, thankfully I’ve been through the journey and I can hopefully prevent them for ever getting as sick as I was."
Yolanda Hadid ‘wanted to die’ after Lyme disease diagnosis
