Tyler James Williams revealed his Crohn’s Disease diagnosis.
In a interview with PEOPLE, Williams shared that he had three different surgeries to deal with Crohn’s Disease in three months.
“I’ve been looking for a real actionable way to tell my story, my IBD journey. Because I felt like things happened to me that didn’t necessarily need to because of the steps that I took,” the Abbott Elementary star said,
“I spent a portion of my life and career in wild amounts of discomfort and pain, only to find out that had I had a more in-depth conversation with a gastroenterologist, a lot of that could have either been treated more directly or avoided,” he continued. “So I don’t want anybody who’s in the position that I was in previously to have to go through the same things.”
In August 2015, Williams was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, just before he turned 23. He said that his first major flare-up happened when he was just 19. Throughout childhood, the signs were always there, Williams said.
“I’ve experienced some of the milder symptoms of the disease. But then also some of the very extremes as well,” Williams said. “So much of that was due to the neglect of not treating the disease ahead of time.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, Crohn’s dieseas is a form of IBD that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. The disease effects more than half fof the citizens in the United States. If eft untreated, Crohn’s disease can be fatal. Willaims recalled learning more about the disease when he was hospitlaized.
I was waiting for the doctor to give me some kind of big, really scary diagnosis,” Williams recalled. “He mentioned Crohn’s disease and I didn’t know what that was. So although it was explained to me, there was a certain level of seriousness I just didn’t take to it.”
In anuary 2016 he required surgery, to deal with the painful symptoms. The procedure invovles removing a damaged portion of the digestive tract and reconnecting the healthy sections.
“I needed to have three surgeries over the course of three months. And was hospitalized on both the east and west coast for the better part of a year,” he said.
As the face of the face of AbbVie’s new “Beyond a Gut Feeling” campaign, Williams wants to hve more conversations about IBD.
“There are people who are suffering much like I was because they just don’t know how to talk about it,” Williams added. “I can understand that people have a hesitancy to talk about their digestive systems. But I hope that by me talking about this more frequently, it breaks that wall down a little bit.”