Montel Williams: 'I'm not ready to die from MS — I'd rather live'

At the age of 43, author, actor, TV host, and entrepreneur Montel Williams was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). “I was on an airplane flying from New York to Utah to shoot an episode of the show Touched by an Angel. I got on this plane in the morning and my feet caught on fire,” Williams tells Yahoo Lifestyle, holding back tears. “The pain was so extreme, and when I focus in on it I can sense it, I can remember it. It was so bad that I literally couldn’t stand up at the end of the flight.” When Williams was diagnosed with MS shortly thereafter, he says the doctor who diagnosed him gave him a “death sentence” and a litany of opioid prescriptions to dull the pain. “I was walking around in this pseudo-suicidal state,” Williams says. “After my second attempt at taking my own life, I recognized that I was going to not just live with this, I was going to figure out — in some way, shape, or form — how to turn this into something I could thrive at.”