Toni Braxton opens up about her lupus diagnosis.
During a recent interview, Toni Braxton spoke candidly about when she was first diagnosed with the auto immune disease.
She says that her management suggested that she kept it a secret. “People get scared around sick celebrities,” she said. And I couldn’t get insured. You would not get work, because the second I was told I had it, I didn’t get work at first. No one wanted to put me on a stage. ‘Well, supposed she collapsed on stage, and the insurance, how are we going to do that?’ And so I couldn’t, at first I did not work.”
Braxton’s rheumatologist, Dr. Daniel Wallace, joined her on the podcast and explained, “It takes an average of three and a half years for someone with non-organ threatening lupus to be diagnosed and an average of four different doctors.” He says there are about 200,000 lupus patients and about a third of them are Black women.
“It took me 10 years to get a diagnosis. I felt like a hypochondriac. Like I’m just telling people, ‘I don’t feel well,’ and no one’s listening. And lupus doesn’t have a look to it- not to say that other things do, but we always try to fake that we’re feeling great or we don’t want to worry anyone. As mothers and women, we tend to do that anyway,” Braxton says.
You can catch Braxton on a new season of her reality show Braxton Family Values. Toni says of the show return, “You know, it’s really important [because] we lost one of our sisters, she wanted us to do this show again, and we were hesitant at first. But we said, ‘We’re gonna do it for Traci. What’s really important about doing our show is [telling] real stories about family. And I think when people see our stories, maybe we can help them in having a loss in the family.”