Eric Dane’s widow Rebecca Gayheart reveals the first sign she knew something was wrong before his MND diagnosis

Eric Dane’s widow Rebecca Gayheart has revealed the first sign that she knew something wasn’t right ahead of his devastating Motor Neurone Disease (MND) diagnosis. 

The former model, 55, opened up with Drew Barrymore on Personal Space and explained that there was one symptom that she noticed early on. 

The Greys Anatomy alum died in February at age 53, after being diagnosed with the disease in 2024. 

But before his diagnosis, Gayheart explained that her estranged husband started to get headaches, something which was very new for him. 

“He never once had a headache for all the years we were married or dated,” she said. 

She noted that he started to complain about headaches “a few months” before the weakness in his hand started. 

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“I was like, ‘Eric, you never get headaches. You’ve never taken an Advil. What are you talking about a headache? You don’t have a headache,'” she recalled.

But at the time Dane brushed it off, and simply blamed it on something like he had “slept on [his] neck funny.”

“That continued. That was a part of it. So there were definitely signs, but nothing was so major that you would really stop and pay attention to it,” Gayheart continued. 

While that was the first symptom that she noticed, for Dane he suspected something was going on while he struggled to use chopsticks during a dinner eating sushi. 

The actor opened up about the moment in his posthumous memoir, My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments.

“Suddenly I can’t work the chopsticks with my right hand,” he recalled in the book. 

“My hand tingles, and then my fingers feel numb.”

The Greys Anatomy fan-favourite put it down to “texting too much” but three weeks later the weakness just got worse and he couldn’t “grip the chopsticks at all”. 

The Euphoria star then spent months being shuffled from doctor to doctor and undergoing a lot of testing before he was given what doctors believed was the answer.  

He received a misdiagnosis of multifocal motor neuropathy, “a rare autoimmune disorder causing extreme muscle weakness” with “90 per cent effective” treatment.

But his medical team got “scared” when he did not respond to the treatment.

Nine months later – after a lumbar puncture, spinal fluid extraction and brain scans – he received his diagnosis, MND. 

The rare but deadly neurodegenerative disorder, which is known in the US as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, affects the motor nerves that allow a person to move, swallow, talk and eventually breathe. 

The actor went public with the news in April 2025, the same month he and Gayheart filed to dismiss their divorce.

Gayheart explained that while they were not together romantically after his diagnosis and in the months before his death, they did keep their family “intact” for daughters Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14.

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