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Karen Duffy continues to model for Revlon, tour the country as a women's health advocate, and report for Michael Moore's new show, The Awful Truth. She lives with her husband in New York City.

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From Revlon spokesmodel to film actress to one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People," Karen Duffy was living the life most of us only dream of. Then her whirlwind life of celebrity parties came to an abrupt, grinding halt when she was stricken with a serious illness in one of its rarest forms: sarcoidosis of the central nervous system.

Duffy soon realized that the only way for her to survive was not to take the disease too seriously. Instead of hiding from life, she chose to run toward it. She learned to embrace the chaos of a life-threatening disease with a wit and humor that helped her to find the love of her life at a time when things seemed darkest.

Model Patient is a gripping, inspiring, and hilarious memoir that recounts the singular triumphs and tragedies of coping with a chronic, life-threatening disease.

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Model Patient

Perennial

Chapter One

The View from the Penthouse Overlooking Success Street

In 1995, I went to the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles with George Clooney. To nobody's greater surprise than my own, except for my aunt's, who always said I'd wind up living in my parents' basement, I was a mildly warm commodity. I was acting and modeling, and the show I was a correspondent for, TV Nation, had already won an Emmy the night before for best documentary show. But the small-to-medium-size spotlight that shone on me didn't blind me to that fact that an Emmy date with George was a score, not just because he was a real star, but because he was such an enormously entertaining guy.

I'd also been palling around with Dwight Yoakam, and I'd even been spending time with Robert DeNiro. I wasn't exactly dating any of them at the time, and I certainly wasn't serious about any one relationship, but in getting to spend time with three rad dudes like George, Dwight, and Bob, I felt like I'd hit the man trifecta at Celebrity Raceway Park.

George was nominated for Best Actor, and although he didn't win, I threw a big party at the Chateau Marmont afterwards. As far as I knew at that moment, everything was perfect in my life and all I had to do was enjoy it to the fullest extent possible. I was going to do a documentary on kayaking in the Sea of Cortez with Arnold Palmer. I was busy modeling for Revlon, I'd just been in Dumb and Dumber, and I had TV development deals all over the place. I was happier than Jerry Lewis in Paris. Everything was going smoothly.

I had worked hard to achieve some things, but I hadn't had to struggle and, like a lot of people in the same circumstances, I didn't really appreciate all that I had. Not in the way I do now, that's for damn sure. When I first got a child's-size portion of fame from being a VJ on MTV, People magazine named me one of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World." (I had a cold sore on the day of the photo shoot and they had to shoot me only in profile.) I told the interviewer that the night before I got the word from People, I'd won an Ernest Borgnine Look-alike Contest, and I was incredibly honored to receive both accolades. I also told him I'd never had a bad day in my life, and that remained true all the way up until I had a really bad day -- the worst of my life.

Though I'd been trying to ignore it, for a couple of weeks I'd had a bad headache, which had gotten steadily worse. By the evening of the Emmy Awards it was like the Devil himself was inside my brain with a hot poker, which he was trying to ram through the top of my skull. Still, I would have gone to the Emmys with George if it meant carrying my head in with me in a hand-tooled leather bag.

The next day the headache was even more intense. I was still trying to ignore the pain, so I decided it was just too much champagne. I called George to see if he had a touch of the Irish flu as well. He said no, he was fine.

As the day went on, the headache didn't get any better. The pain exploded in my head like a can of Coke that had been violently shaken and then popped open. I was trying to have a normal day resting in my room, but when the pain struck I was stopped in my tracks, as if I'd been electrocuted. I'd been miming the aura of good health for for a few weeks, but when I looked around for painkillers and realized I'd downed an entire large bottle of Advil in just two days, I knew I couldn't fake it any more.

I cancelled everything in Los Angeles, hopped a plane to New York, and took a cab straight to my doctor's office. I didn't know it at the time, but when I stepped out of that taxi, my life as a healthy person ended and my life as a sick person began. And I was about to get really, really sick.

Excerpted from Model Patientby Duffy, Karen Copyright © 2004 by Karen Duffy. Excerpted by permission.
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