Rebecca Gayheart looked back at the emotional moment when Eric Dane told her about his ALS diagnosis.
The Beverly Hills, 90210 actress wrote an essay for The Cut titled “In Sickness and in Health,” and discussed Eric’s health scare.
The estranged wife of the Euphoria star recalled that she and Dane both were “weeping” after he broke the news of his ALS diagnosis.
He later went public with his diagnosis in April 2025.
Gayheart mentioned in the article that Dane called her from a doctor’s office in San Francisco after seeing a neurologist.
“His symptoms started maybe a year prior. When we would have a meal with the kids, he’d say things like, ‘Something’s wrong with my hand,’ ” she wrote. “He was struggling to use his chopsticks, dropping his food. That was when he started seeing doctors. He was initially diagnosed with a few other things, but he had this sinking feeling that it was something more serious.”
Initially, Gayrhear believed that it was nothing serious, but when Dane finally told her the diagnosis, they got emotional.
“When he told me that day, he just started weeping, as did I, It didn’t feel real because he was still okay,” she noted
“I was here at home with my youngest daughter — my home, that I share with just the girls, since Eric and I separated in September 2017 — and I’d gone into my closet to take the call, trying to be private. She was saying, ‘Mommy, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ I tried telling her, ‘Honey, nothing. Everything’s fine,’ because I couldn’t process it. I didn’t know all the details like I do now, but I knew enough about ALS to know that there wasn’t a cure,” she recalled.