00:00I will say, he never once had a headache for all the years we were married or dated.
00:08And a few months before he started complaining with his hand, he started getting headaches.
00:18And I was like, Eric, you never get headaches. You've never taken an Advil.
00:21What are you talking about? A headache? You don't have a headache.
00:24And he was like, well, maybe I slept on my neck funny.
00:27Rebecca Gayhart was concerned about her estranged husband Eric Dane's headaches ahead of his ALS diagnosis.
00:34The actress told Drew Barrymore on Personal Space that this symptom was the first she noticed.
00:38The former model explained that he started complaining about some a few months before his hand weakness.
00:43Gayhart noted, that continued, that was a part of it.
00:46So there were definitely signs, but nothing so major that you would really stop and pay attention to it.
00:51Gayhart also spoke to Today.com detailing her late husband's brutal decline in the final week before his tragic death.
00:58She noted that by that point in Dane's battle with ALS, he had gone to the hospital so many times
01:03before,
01:03and they would patch him up, so to speak, and he would come home.
01:07However, Gayhart, along with her and Dane's two daughters, Billy, 16, and George, 14,
01:13knew something was wrong by Dane's third day in the hospital.
01:16She recalled,
01:17Everything shifted, just the tone of when the doctors were talking to us, and some of the information we were
01:22given.
01:23Gayhart told the outlet that the Grey's Anatomy star also became aware of the severity of the situation.
01:28Ultimately, Dane had the final say in how his health journey was going to end.
01:32To comfort the euphoria actor in his final days, Gayhart and their daughters had family sleepovers in Dane's hospital room.
01:39He passed away on February 19th, less than one year after he announced his diagnosis with ALS.
01:44He was 53.
01:46In Dane's posthumous book, My Book of Days, A Memoir in Moments, the late star revealed his first sign of
01:52ALS,
01:53was when he suddenly began struggling to use chopsticks at dinner with his family.
01:57He also shared with readers that Gayhart was the first person he told of his heartbreaking diagnosis.
02:02After breaking the news to his estranged wife, she told him,
02:05I'm here. We'll fight this together. I'm not going anywhere.
02:08Gayhart filed for divorce from Dane in February 2018 after 14 years of marriage,
02:13but withdrew the petition last November due to the actor's health issues.
