Alec Baldwin: 'We live in fear of Lyme' disease

Long Island native Alec Baldwin, who four years ago first detailed his past struggles with Lyme disease, is now describing the steps his family takes to avoid it at their home in Amagansett.

"Lyme disease out here is a big deal. … We live in fear of Lyme," the three-time Emmy Award-winner, 63, said in a podcast recorded earlier this year for Wednesday's episode of "HypochondriActor," co-hosted by "Will & Grace" star Sean Hayes and physician and stand-up comic Dr. Priyanka Wali. Spread most commonly by the black-legged tick aka deer tick, Lyme disease can cause fever, fatigue and skin rash, and left untreated can lead to facial paralysis, arthritis and other conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"My wife is pulling ticks off my kids all year long," Baldwin said of "Mom Brain" podcaster Hilaria Baldwin, 37, and their six children aged 3 months to 7 years old. "This is Tick Central out here." Even during winter, if the weather is mild, he said, "The ticks are beyond. They just come busting out like it's — what's that concert everybody goes to? It's Coachella for ticks out here."

The Amityville-born and Massapequa-raised Alec Baldwin added jocularly that, "My wife is the kind of person who … finds one tick on one of my kids' pants and she's like, 'That's it! Hiking season is over!' She just terminates hiking season."

Reiterating a story he told an audience at the Bay Area Lyme Foundation's annual LymeAid Benefit Gala in Portola Valley, California, in May 2017, Baldwin said he had his first bout with the disease two decades ago. "I literally felt a weird scab-like thing dead in the center of my back between my shoulder blades," he recalled. He went on to experience Lyme disease "probably … four times over five years where it came back at the exact same time."

One August, he described, "I was standing on my friend's porch at night … and I felt this … wave go over my back and over my shoulders and kind of wrap around me like a chill, and I got, like, just attacked. It came like someone snapped their fingers and put a spell on me. … And this thing just attacks me and I wound up laying in my bed for three days sweating through my sheets and just this horrible joint pain and soreness …. I couldn't even get up for, like, three days."

He had first mentioned his Lyme disease in passing to The New York Times in 2011.

Among others who have contracted Lyme disease is Long Island Music Hall of Famer Debbie Gibson, who revealed in 2014 that she had struggled with it for more than a year. After developing what she called a "skeletal" appearance that had sparked public concern, the singer regained her health through alternative treatments including chiropractic kinesiology, she said.