Terry Crews and his wife, Rebecca King Crews, have shared that she has been battling Parkinson’s Disease for more than a decade.
The celebrity couple opened up about her health challenges and that she recently underwent a procedure to help her manage the symptoms.
“I’m able to write my name and my dates, and I’m able to write with my right hand for the first time in probably three years,” King Crews said on “Today.”
She said that symptoms started in 2012 with numbness in her left foot while she was working out. The numbness progressed into a limp, which she said her doctors claimed was from working out too much.
Then her left arm wasn’t moving as much as her right. She said her personal trainer noticed that.
Finally, one morning while putting on lip gloss her hand was shaking and she knew it was a tremor, “because my grandmother had tremors.”
King Crews said her doctors said it was anxiety, and a neurologist couldn’t pinpoint what was happening, but a Parkinson’s specialist finally diagnosed her three years later in 2015, she said.
Her health did not slow her down, as she was writing a book, producing an album and launching a clothing line. But still, she had challenges because of the tremors, which made it difficult to put on makeup or brush her teeth, she told “Today.”
“I believe that you don’t lay down and die because you got a diagnosis,” she said.
Part of that was undergoing a new treatment, a non-invasive surgical procedure called bilateral focused ultrasound, just approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year.
Crews brought the option to his wife after she said she had not slept for three days last year because of the disease. King Crews told People magazine, “I felt like I wanted to die.”
“I’d been reading about this and researching it for ten years,” the actor said. “I told her, ‘Honey, I really think this will help you.’ ”.
A device sends ultrasound waves to specific spots in the brain, guided by MRI, to target parts that control movement.
It is not a cure, but an adjunct therapy that works while on medication.
King Crews underwent the procedure on March 4 and has seen a significant improvement in symptoms, including the tremor on her right side disappearing. She still has symptoms on her left side and will be getting a second procedure on the other side of her brain later this year.
Crews said he got emotional when he saw her write her name for the first time in three years.
He got “choked up just thinking about it,” he told “Today.”
She is just disclosing her Parkinson’s diagnosis despite living with it for more than a decade because the treatment is still new, expensive and is not covered by insurance.
“And (I want) to give hope to people with Parkinson’s, because I believe that we’re going to find the cure,” King Crews said. She hopes that by speaking, it could become available to others.
This was not the only illness she has had to deal with. King Crews had a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020.
“When they say sickness and health, this is the battle that we were designed to fight together,” Crews said. “Where she’s weak, I’m strong. Where I’m weak, she’s strong. And we built each other up like that for almost 37 years and all the way to forever.”
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