The former Desert Island Discs host said the illness – which causes chronic pain all over the body – “corroded” her personality and started to “grind down” her “sense of self”.
In a candid interview, she told how she lost her sense of humour, struggled to be happy and could not do simple tasks with her family.
The 54-year-old, who also has rheumatoid arthritis, said she felt like she was “going mental”.
Kirsty, famed for her husky Scottish voice, hosted almost 500 editions of BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs between 2006 and 2018.
But she had to step away from her job interviewing celebrity castaways to have treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia.
READ MORE BBC viewers complain about Nicky Campbell’s commentary as he covers speech
However, after a long period of suffering, Kirsty says she is now “doing OK” and that the condition has “all calmed down”.
But the broadcaster must take daily walks, get plenty of sleep and does yoga to help stay on top of it.
Kirsty said: “The pain, it starts to corrode your personality. You start to lose your sense of humour, your bandwidth for life in general becomes much, much tighter, so you can’t really cope with things that would normally wash over. You feel like a loser.
“I felt like a loser. Because if there’s a long drive to take your child somewhere, you can’t do that, or if it’s standing out in the cold to watch a hockey match, that makes you feel very bad. That’s part of the grinding down of your sense of self.”
Kirsty told The Adam Buxton Podcast she developed rheumatoid arthritis first, in her hands and wrists, and later fibromyalgia. She said: “At the time I was just taking off-the-shelf painkillers and [using] hot water bottles and [taking] hot baths.
“None of it really worked. I had a very brilliant medic who put me on a path of taking medicine. Sleep was at the root of it, rheumatoid arthritis had disrupted my sleep.”
Kirsty returned after a four-year break to cover the Platinum Jubilee and the Queen’s funeral last year.
She said practising yoga has been life-changing and added how medical advancements are helping to treat fibromyalgia, which “has been a discounted condition”. Kirsty said: “I was very fortunate, after going down loads of blind alleys, to meet someone who really did understand it.”
- Support fearless journalism
- Read The Daily Express online, advert free
- Get super-fast page loading
Source: Read Full Article