Pamela Anderson opened up about her experience living with hepatitis C in a moving speech over the weekend.
The actress delivered the remarks, which were posted in part by Variety on Sunday, at a gala hosted by amfAR, an organization focused on global health and ending AIDS, where the actress received the award of courage.
“Back in the late ’90s, when I was diagnosed with hepatitis C, there was no cure,” Anderson said in her speech. “It was a death sentence — that’s what my doctor told me, that I probably had around 10 years to live.”
Anderson said the diagnosis and life expectancy prediction had a significant impact on her decision-making.
“I’m sure that colored and corrupted my decisions,” she said. “It was not fear of death, but fear of what might happen to my young children. It turned my life inside out.”
The Last Showgirl actress said when a cure finally came “10 blurry years later,” she was able to take it.
“I was lucky. I was offered it in its early stages. And it took everything I had in my bank to pay for it,” she said, noting the cure “wasn’t covered by insurance yet.”
“I felt tremendous guilt that others weren’t granted the same access,” she said.
Anderson, who said she is now free of hepatitis C — the model and actress first announced she was free from the disease in 2015, according to People — said her “experience of shame and guilt was also an unconscious journey” that has stayed with her years later.
“I worked with organizations in those times to bring awareness, I promoted getting tested, reducing the stigma, but who was I kidding, my words did not match my feelings. I was angry and scared,” she said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered from that news. I’ve assimilated it, I’ve finally come to terms, maybe,” she added.
Anderson said she found healing through the arts, adding that her experience helped fuel her career in film.
“Courage expands one’s life, while fear diminishes it. The choice is ours,” Anderson said in her closing remarks, echoing a famous quote from French-born author Anais Nin. “As we look at others across the room tonight, be kind, because we’re all in this together, and all of us fight some invisible battle.”
Hepatitis C is a viral infection that causes inflammation of the liver, according to the World Health Organization.
The potentially life-threatening disease is typically spread through contact with an infected person’s blood, including through “unsafe injections and procedures in health care, unscreened blood transfusions, sharing of needles and syringes among people who inject drugs and sexual practices that lead to exposure to blood,” according to the WHO.
Most individuals who are infected initially do not have symptoms. Symptoms can take two weeks to six months to manifest after infection and may include fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, dark urine and yellowing of the skin or eyes, the global health organization states.
Hepatitis C infection can often go undiagnosed for years, if not decades, due to lack of symptoms. For those unknowingly living with hepatitis C long-term, they can develop signs of serious liver damage or liver cancer years later, according to the WHO.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that “many people with hepatitis C don’t look or feel sick, so might not know they have the virus.”
Between 2017 and 2020, the CDC estimates between 2.4 million and 4 million people in the U.S. had hepatitis C.
“Most people can be cured of hepatitis C with timely treatment,” the agency states.
Treatment typically involves eight to 12 weeks of oral medication, according to the CDC, with more than 95% of patients being cured of the disease, “usually without side effects.”
There is currently no vaccine available for hepatitis C.
Dr. Jennifer Miao, a board-certified cardiologist at Yale New Haven Health and a fellow in the ABC News Medical Unit, contributed to this report.
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