A contestant on the dating show The Bachelor named Lexi Young walked out on Graziadei’s heart during Season 28 due to a health issue, but she said she gained love in other ways from the experience.
The Bachelor is a game show, reality TV, and romance series created by Mike Fleiss and presented by Chris Harrison, Emmanuel Acho, and Jesse Palmer.
She talks to People about the illness she is facing with endometriosis, which is a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus begins to grow outside the uterus.
Lexi Young, 30-year-old, said to People, “I ended up going to the UCLA hospital while I was on the show,”
“I had an ovarian cyst burst because I froze my eggs two weeks before going on the show. And so my ovaries were so enlarged from all the hormones that they hadn’t come back down yet.”
Added, “I wanted to keep it private, but I think it just goes to show it wasn’t the perfect ride. I was dealing with this the entire time,” she says. “I’m just very headstrong, and I powered through it.”
She shared her endometriosis with Graziade after spending four weeks on the reality show. Still, after 6 weeks of dating, she decided that Graziade only wanted a three-year-long engagement and a few years of marriage before starting a family.
She explains, “I do feel as though I made the right choice… for both Joey and myself. We’re on different timelines, and that’s okay. So I stand down in my decision,”
“I think I could have stayed, and it wouldn’t have been fair to Joey. We would’ve been walking into a marriage with different expectations on what that looks like.”
She continues, “There’s a difference between a painful period and not being able to function,”
“As I went through high school and college, it just kept getting worse and worse but I was being told by doctors that nothing’s wrong.”
“I’ll remember that day for the rest of my life,” she says. “I walked into the hospital and it was like 50% ‘It’s finally an answer to my pain,’ and then 50% ‘I don’t want to have this incurable condition.’”
“I felt validated for the first time in over a decade,” she adds. “I felt like I actually had a doctor that was listening to me and that my pain was real. I just remember I was so emotional, I burst into tears.”
On February 6, she talked about his illness story in an Instagram post:
In closing, she said she is very grateful she had the opportunity to share her story on TV and hopes to raise awareness for other women who suffer from the condition to know they are not alone.
“I was so nervous. It’s a heavy topic to bring up, and it’s so hyper-personal to me,”
Young explains. “I just wanted to make sure that I spoke about it correctly, and I wanted to make sure I told my story in a way that I’d be proud of. And I do feel like I did.”