Tisha Campbell is getting candid about her sarcoidosis diagnosis – and how her divorce might have been the cure she needed after all.
During an appearance on the Mibo Show Podcast with Shanti Dias, the 55-year-old actress opened up about her journey with the inflammatory disease, jokingly adding that her 2020 divorce from Duane Martin led her to go into remission.
“Everything helped. But I believe… I’m sorry, I have to tell the truth. I have been in remission for four years now. They can’t find it at the base of my brain at all,” Campbell said during the episode, which was taped at the Johnson & Johnson headquarters in New Jersey.
“I was so scared to get COVID because I thought, if I get COVID, I’m going to die. Every cold took me to the hospital. Every sniffle. Allergies would just build up, and I would get sick. But I have not been sick since I got a divorce.”
Aware of the potential misinterpretation, Campbell quickly clarified, “I don’t mean no harm,” she added, laughing. “But when you have any type of disorder or anything like that, stress is a killer. And it’s connected to your body!”
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The comedic actress has been battling sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that causes growths or granulomas in the lungs, eyes, and lymph nodes and impacts Black women more than any other group, since 2001.
She was diagnosed with Stage 1 sarcoidosis after having her son Xen while filming for My Wife and Kids.
“I had this cold — what I assumed was a cold — for a very long time. I had taken everything over the counter, under the counter — behind the counter, not under the counter, [but] probably did some of that too,” Campbell joked. “I just could not breathe.”
“It felt like an elephant was on my chest, and I remember being on the set of My Wife and Kids and asking, you know, the [assistant directors] if they could call a doctor to come to the set because, you know, at this point, I know I have to have some type of, like, pneumonia.”
After a round of what seemed like a hundred tests and a biopsy of her lungs, she was diagnosed.
Doctors prescribed steroids to manage the inflammation, but these came with a hefty price tag. “The [steroids] bloat you, they make you very, very sick in other ways,” Campbell explained. “With your insulin and all kinds of stuff. So, I was pre-diabetic, and it just kept getting worse.”
When she had her second son, Ezekiel, the Martin alum found out that her sarcoidosis had developed into stage 2.
The news hit her hard because her fellow TV star and comedian Bernie Mac had stage 4 sarcoidosis and had died from complications of pneumonia. So she decided to fight it in every way possible, including exercising her lungs via singing, avoiding any stress, and taking the dreaded steroids.
“He (Bernie Mac) had the worst kind. He would be in between scenes getting oxygen, and I just didn’t want to be that,” she said. “I knew any type of stress adds on to any disease that you have. I just started working out really hard despite the fact that I could not breathe at all.”
Campbell’s symptoms have subsided since finalizing her divorce from Duane Martin in 2020. Campbell was married to Martin, 58, for over 20 years, and the two share two kids.
She filed for divorce in 2018 – claiming she endured emotional, mental, and physical abuse throughout their union.
“I am here to say that I have I am so proud of where I am in my mental health and my physical health now,” Campbell noted on the podcast. “Because I understood that they are a combination. Whether you have any type of disorder, it’s important to understand you got to do everything that’s right.”
Watch the full episode here:
