In her new memoir, There Is No F*cking Secret: Letters From a Badass Bitch, Kelly Osbourne shares the difficult road she’s traveled growing up in the public eye. Most people are aware that the star was constantly scrutinized, and battled substance abuse from a very young age. What many didn’t realize, including Kelly for years, was that underneath this struggle was another physical affliction: Lyme disease.

For about 10 years, Kelly had “traveling pain,” that would come and go in various parts of her body. After she had a seizure on March 7 2013 during the filming of E!’s Fashion Police, she was diagnosed with epilepsy. Doctors began experimenting with prescriptions, trying to find the proper drugs to control her symptoms. She wrote:

“My prescriptions kept piling up. I couldn’t sleep, so they gave me Ambien. When Ambien made me nauseated, they switched me to Trazodone, but that gave me acid reflux, so then I had to take an antacid every day. I took cranberry extract and antibiotics because one medication made me prone to getting urinary tract infections. Painkillers — for an ex–painkiller addict — to help with the head and body aches. Not kidding — I had pills to deal with the anxiety that I was having from taking so many pills.”

When a prescription made it difficult for Kelly to even talk, she hit her limit, telling family, “I can’t live like this anymore. I’m a vegetable.” After entering her symptoms into online sites, she began to suspect she had Lyme disease. She was tested, and the results showed that she was in stage 2 neurological Lyme disease. Kelly wrote, “I was relieved to finally know what was going on, but I was also scared s–tless.”

At this point, Kelly flew to a treatment center in Germany where she received stem cell therapy to strengthen her body to fight the disease on her own. Until now she has kept quiet about her illness because she felt that people were glamorizing the disease. She wrote:

“…it seems like the trendy disease to have right now, and I’m tired of seeing sad celebrities play the victim on the cover of weekly mags. Since I know firsthand how awfully debilitating it is, I know who really has it and who is just trying to prolong their 15 minutes. I don’t understand how anyone could think that the life you have to live with Lyme disease is glamorous.”

Kelly has also learned to trust her body and her gut. She wrote, “I’ve learned to advocate for myself when it comes to my health, and I trust my intuition. If I think something is wrong, I refuse to let anyone dismiss it.”

To read more about Kelly’s journey, pick up a copy of There Is No F*cking Secret: Letters From a Badass Bitch.