Miranda Hart: Bedbound with Lyme disease, I realised I didn’t want to be alone
The comedian has spoken about living will the chronic illness for years without being diagnosed, and of her joy at getting married at the age of 51.
Miranda Hart has said she realised she “didn’t want to be alone” when she was bedbound with Lyme disease.
The comedian, best known for her eponymous BBC sitcom Miranda, talked about living with the chronic illness for years without being diagnosed while promoting her new book, I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You.
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Wednesday, she also spoke of her joy at meeting her partner and recently getting married at the age of 51.
She said: “I think the reason I put this little love story of mine in it was mainly because at the beginning of the book I’m alone, I’m bedbound by this illness, I don’t know what it is.
“And what that sort of length of aloneness and waiting in a darkness, in a confusing place, (does) is that it gives you the chance to long for what you want to do.
“And I realised I didn’t want to be alone.”
She revealed that getting married in midlife had given her “a full injection of joy and fun”.
“All my friends (who) have been married 20-30 years are like ‘Ugh, husband’ and I’m like ‘Husband, he’s great’. It’s the best,” she said.
The comic lived with symptoms for many years before she got a diagnosis “under the banner of ME”.
She said: “I rejoined the dots with my symptomology and my history and realised that probably when I was about 14 or 15 I got a tick-borne illness in the form of Lyme disease, and that’s when my symptoms started. You could call it long Lyme.
“It was such a relief to finally be understood. Being misunderstood and misjudged is one of the hardest things about these kind of conditions.”
Lyme disease is a bacterial infection that can be spread to humans by infected ticks, according to the NHS website.
When Hart was bedbound with the disease, she said she had to learn to “live moment by moment” because she could not keep herself busy with work.
“I think unless you’ve had fatigue you don’t understand what literally not getting up off the floor was. There’d be times when I’d look at a glass of water and think ‘I don’t know how to pick that up’,” she said.
“I think the hardest thing to learn is acceptance and surrendering to your situation.
“And I’d spent so many years… because I have this adventurous, bold, excitable love of life, and I had so many dreams and ideas, and some of them came true, which was extraordinary, and I didn’t want them to end, and I didn’t want to stop working.”
Reflecting on how she is now, she said: “Emotionally, I feel very well, which is important for me to say, because obviously I’ve been labelled as the anxious one.
“Physically, I think there’s just a little way to go to get my full energy back. Getting back to work has been a really exciting next step, but a bit of an adjustment.
“I have to be careful how much I say yes to and how much I say no to… But, in a year, I feel like it’s possible, with this diagnosis, to have my full energy back.
“And at the moment I still deal with the ghastly fatigue from time to time, but in a much more accepting and calm way, not always.”
Hart starred in her self-titled TV sitcom from 2009 until 2015 and has also appeared in BBC sitcoms Hyperdrive and Not Going Out.
Discussing her plans for the future, she said: “This book was very authentic, vulnerable, more serious tone, although there are a lot of laughs in it.
“So we’ll see which way it goes (in the future), whether I end up getting much more serious or go back to silliness. I do crave silliness.”
