Wendy Williams Sheds Tears Talking About Her Lymphedema

Wendy Williams broke down in tears as she described the toll lymphedema had on her feet in her Lifetime documentary, Where Is Wendy Williams.

In a clip from the documentary, Williams explained that her swollen feet were a symptom of lymphedema.

“This is lymphedema, and I can only feel now 2%. Do you see what this looks like?”

The camera panned down to her feet, revealing her extremely swollen feet. The 59-year-old media personality shed tears before looking directly at the camera.

“There’s no cure for this. There’s no pill for this,” she exclaimed.

The clip cut to a production member holding Williams to help her keep her balance as she told those around her she needed to sit down.

“I should be in a wheelchair, you know,” she added in her confessional. 

Williams has shown lymphedema’s effects on her feet before the documentary. In 2021, she got candid about her condition during a 2021 segment of The Wendy Williams Show after her team deleted an Instagram photo of her swollen feet.

“When I posted my feet yesterday, and there was a whole big deal in the IT department,” Williams began.

“‘Are you sure you want to post this? They’re going to be mean to you. I don’t think you should do it.’ Hours later, I call up, and I’m like, ‘Why is my picture not up? I will not send another Instagram picture to you.’ Yeah, like I had a knife to his side. I’m not going to send you another picture until you post this picture. This is me with lymphedema.”

Williams, at the time, said her feet weren’t painful but numb and discolored.

The following year, she did an interview with TMZ, holding up her swollen and dark foot to the camera to show her feet and claim she lost feeling in them.

“Do you see this?” She asked. “It’s up and down. I can only feel maybe 5% of my feet. Do you understand? Normally, I would be in a wheelchair. I’m not in a wheelchair. I stand up.”

“Most people don’t even know what lymphedema is,” she continued. “You don’t take a pill, and it goes away. You [don’t] go under surgery, and it goes away. It’s forever. When I stand up, honestly, all I do is look down because I don’t want to fall down.”

In addition to her lymphedema diagnosis, Williams had been candid with her fans about her struggles with Graves’ Disease, which impacts the muscles behind her eyeballs, causing them to bulge.

Before the first two episodes of Where is Wendy Williams debuted, Lifetime advertised the series by posting clips from the documentary on Instagram, showing the talk show host looking frail, which concerned her fans. A couple of days before the episodes aired, her team announced on Feb. 22 that, in 2023, the media connoisseur was also diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a progressive disorder that impacts her behavior and cognitive function, and aphasia, a neurotic condition that affects language and communication skills.