Keltie Knight: What I Learned Facing Medical Gaslighting and How I Finally Got Help When I Seemed “Okay”

When my periods were so bad in junior high school, and I would stay home "sick," the cruel girls in the grade would make fun of me, "Keltie is sick again, once a month," as if I was already so bad at being a girl that I was the only one who couldn't handle this part of womanhood. We are taught from a very young age that to be a woman is to suffer. So, like most people on the planet with a not so "cute-urus," I learned to deal, I learned to feel awful, I learned to hide it, and I learned to never question my pain, my heavy periods, or constantly feeling like I was going to pass out.  

Realistically, through my teens and 20s, I was so full of jubilant youthful energy that while my symptoms affected my life, they were not as debilitating. It wasn't until the perfect circle of having all my dreams come true working as a television host on one of the biggest shows on the planet, and reaching peri-menopause, that the way I felt became unbearable. Most importantly, I looked "fine." In fact, with the right glam team and a killer dress, I could show up as gorgeous. How could someone wearing Louboutins and winning an Us Weekly "Who wore it better?" fashion face-off be sick? 

This year at the age of 42, 30 years after those periods caused me to miss school, I finally received a proper diagnosis and a doctor who cared enough to dive in until I had answers.

At the Oscars this past year, while I was hosting over 7 hours of live TV for the E! red carpet, I was hiding a pretty big secret (and it wasn't just my swollen and sore distended belly under a tight corset). As soon as "award season" wrapped, I would be taking a leave from my newly appointed promotion as co-host of E! News, and I was having a hysterectomy. I remember watching the most beautiful women in the world parading down the red carpet in designer couture and wondering how many were hiding some uncomfortable side effects of womanhood and acting like nothing was wrong like me. 

Suffering from a long-term chronic illness is painful, frustrating, and, at times, pretty gross, but the emotion that I felt most of the time was "crazy." I had friends who were dealing with "real" illnesses in their lives, like MS and cancer; my own brother had suffered a terrible accident that required eight surgeries on his back, and he had been in and out of hospitals his entire life. I knew what "sick" looked like, and every time I even thought about genuinely being open to the people around me about what I was suffering through, I stopped myself. Who was I to feel "bad"? On the outside, I was "making it," the business of being "Keltie" was booming. I was juggling multiple once-in-a-lifetime jobs and the successes of being on TV for more than a decade, producing, creating and selling my own TV series not once but twice, writing two best-selling books, being at the forefront of the female podcast movement in 2015 and continuing to create over 700 episodes of the LADYGANG podcast and amass over 250 million downloads. I was on red carpets in designer gowns, I was hobnobbing with the biggest stars on the planet, I was flying in business class seats paid for by other people, I had a small collection of lovely handbags, and I had a great husband and a handful of besties!

But I felt BAD. I always felt sick and no one could tell me why. I would show up at work, and my makeup artists would question why I had hives all over my arms and my hair fell out in clumps in the shower. My brain was fuzzy; everything was blurry, my body ached everywhere, and the bottoms of my feet hurt so bad at night that I couldn't sleep. I was gaining weight and then losing weight in weird spurts, and I was tired, not ordinary, "working too hard, tired." I would sleep 14-15 hours, and then the walk to the bathroom would exhaust me to sleep another 4. When people in my life would notice my sluggish energy, or I would make excuses for not being social, I would laugh and say, "I'm just a delicate flower." I felt like such a loser. 

The doctors I saw were no help. I was gaslit and continuously told that my blood tests were "in the normal range" and that there was nothing wrong with me. When I told a doctor I didn't have the energy to be alive anymore, she'd increased Prozac because she thought I was depressed. I had a different psychologist tell me I was bipolar after talking to me for maybe 3 minutes. I was crying because I was so tired, and all I had done was drive myself for 20 minutes to her office that day. I had slept for 12 hours prior. When I explained my mind-numbing fatigue, one doctor would say, "Maybe you need to learn to say no," or a naturopath would tell me, "Maybe if you tried meditating, you would feel better." I was told by another doctor that I had "chronic fatigue syndrome" and would feel like this forever, and "it happens sometimes." 

Not only was this a terrible way to live. I also dealt with this shame of it all being my fault. If these doctors were correct, my ambition was killing me. I was working too hard, and thus, I deserved to have my gums bleed every morning as soon as I woke up. I cried in therapy and hated myself. Why couldn't I feel normal? Why couldn't I just be happy? Why was everything so complicated? Why was I such a wimp? I had everything I wanted: the job, the house, the husband, and yet I just wanted to be asleep. 

Eventually, my best friend Christina Perri turned me on to the lifesaver Dr. Sadeghi at the Be Hive Of Healing. I felt seen for the first time when he said, "You are very unwell, but you will be well, and I need you to give me one year to make you better." 

Every Friday for one year, I went to his office, and we did every test under the sun; we treated my liver, blood, and brain. I met with other doctors he recommended.

The entire system was broken. It became a full-time job to seek wellness. I had to bring my results in a little yellow file folder from doctor to doctor and explain what the others had found. Connecting the doctors was nearly impossible since they all worked for different medical companies. Not to mention, it was expensive! I am a privileged adult who had the money to pay for tests that weren't covered by insurance. The quest for wellness was killing me. 

We discovered my ferritin level was 5. It was meant to be over 200. I started getting blood infusions. My husband looked at me and said, "Wow, you’re alive again!" but my wellness didn't last. Only months after my infusions, my blood levels plummeted yet again, and I went back to being a walking zombie. Eventually, we discovered that I had micro-cyclic anemia that was impossible to treat because of my lifelong heavy periods. My life was a vicious cycle. Fill me up with healthy, oxygen-rich blood, and then I would bleed it all out a week later. The solution was to stop my period. After the results and scans showed no other option, surgeon Dr. Matthew Seidhoff told me the news: I was the perfect candidate for a hysterectomy, and he was confident my life would change. 

I'm over four months post-op now and Dr. Seidhoff was right; my life has drastically changed. I am alive for the first time in over a decade. My vision isn't blurry, I can stay awake past 7:15 pm, my body doesn't ache, I don't have hives, and I can take my trash out without needing a nap. These small things are revolutionary for me. Now, I cry in therapy because I'm sad that I missed out on so many of the good parts of my life feeling so ill. It isn't exactly sexy to share my hysterectomy journey with a world that still requires us to say "Do you have a tampon?" under our breath at work and loves to discard aging women, but all women must know that to be a woman shouldn't mean to suffer. If you feel unwell, you aren't crazy and you aren’t wrong. We all deserve to feel well; you deserve to enjoy your life.

Keltie Knight is the host of E! News and host of the LADYGANG Podcast. She's written two books "Act Like a Lady" and "Lady Secrets" and you can follow her on Instagram.