Carrie Ann Inaba said her Sjögren's disease leaves her in constant pain and has made her life far less glamorous away from the camera. In a recent Digital interview at Televerse 26, the longtime Dancing with the Stars judge said the condition has reshaped how she moves through ordinary days, from managing her energy to deciding what she can take on.
Inaba, 58, said the pain is debilitating. “And so I am always in pain,” she said, adding that she often lives in sweatpants when she is not on camera, may not have showered in three days and spends time roaming her neighborhood and walking her dogs. The contrast, she said, matters because people are often shown hyper-realistic versions of others and told that is the full picture, when it is not. “We’re all people, we are all going through something,” she said.
That firsthand account gives a rare look at the day-to-day reality of Sjögren's disease, an autoimmune condition that affects moisture glands in the eyes and mouth and can also involve the organs. Inaba said doctors took 10 years to diagnose her, and she needed another 10 to 15 years before she came to peace with the diagnosis. She also said she has not been able to do as much lately, underscoring how much the condition still dictates the pace of her life.
What makes her account harder to flatten into a familiar health story is the way she talks about it. Inaba said she is grateful for Sjögren's disease because it has given her more compassion and empathy, even as it leaves her hurting. She said that experience makes her a better judge because she can feel what people are going through, a sentiment that sits alongside the harsher reality she described of living with a chronic illness that never really lets up.
Inaba also said she suffered a medical emergency while en route to New York in April, though the details of that episode were not disclosed. For now, her most direct update is not about a cure or a breakthrough, but about endurance: she is still managing her energy, still working around pain and still living with a condition that changed her life long before it changed the way she spoke about it publicly.
