Aging is no joke.
Ellen DeGeneres has revealed that she has been diagnosed with osteoporosis, OCD and ADHD.
The Emmy winner, 66, shared the news about her health while discussing aging in her new and last comedy special, “For Your Approval,” which dropped on Netflix Tuesday.
DeGeneres said she only received the diagnoses after she left her long-running daytime talk show following a spate of allegations surfaced in 2020, accusing the comedian of running a toxic workplace.
The star learned she has “full on osteoporosis” – a disease that causes bones to become weak and more likely to fracture – after she took a “stupid bone density test.”
“I don’t even know how I’m standing up right now,” DeGeneres joked. “I’m like a human sandcastle. I could disintegrate in the shower.”
In case the osteoporosis wasn’t bad enough, she said she was also diagnosed with arthritis.
“I had excruciating pain one day and I thought I tore a ligament or something and I got an MRI and they said, ‘No, it’s just arthritis.’ I said, ‘How did I get that?’ And he said, ‘Oh it just happens at your age,’” the stand-up added.
“It’s hard to be honest about aging and seem cool,” she confessed.
As for her obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), DeGeneres revealed she was diagnosed with those conditions when she was in therapy following the claims she created a work environment on her talk show that bred “racism, fear and intimidation.”
“I was in therapy for a while trying to deal with all the hatred that was coming at me,” she shared. “And you know, it was not a common situation for a therapist to deal with.”
She continued, “I may have OCD because a therapist said so and I said, ‘Yes I am very organized,’ because I thought that was the O. I didn’t know what OCD was.”
“I was raised in a religion, Christian Science, that doesn’t acknowledge diseases or disorders,” she explained. “So when I was growing up, nobody talked about anything. There was no discussion of anything.”
“I look back now and I realize my dad for sure had OCD,” she shared. “He would check the doorknob 15 times before we’d leave, he’d check the faucet 15 times, he would unplug all the appliances before we left the house because lightning could strike and it could catch fire.They say it could be hereditary.”
After discussing OCD with her therapist, DeGeneres asked her wife, Portia de Rossi, whether she believed she had OCD.
“Yes you do,” de Rossi, 51, replied.
True to form, DeGeneres turned her health challenges into comedic fodder.
“My ADD makes it really hard to sit down and focus on anything at all. I mean, do you know how hard it was for me to put this together? Of course you don’t. Why would I ask that question? It’s hard for me to focus,” she quipped, eliciting laughs from the audience.
She added, “So, I have ADD, I have OCD, I’m losing my memory. But I think I’m well-adjusted, because I obsess on things, but then I don’t have the attention span to stick with it, and I quickly forget what I was obsessing about in the first place. So, it takes me all the way around to being well adjusted, I think.”
