Andie MacDowell reveals health condition after experiencing sciatica

On By Littum

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Andie Macdowell lives the empty nester life, and it has come with ups and downs.

While promoting the third season of her Hallmark series “The Way Home” on “The Drew Barrymore Show” on Thursday, the 66-year-old “Groundhog Day” star admitted that she “had to work really hard on my independence ” and received a dose of brutal honesty from daughter Margaret Qualley.

“Margaret basically told me I needed to get a life. She was right,” MacDowell told Barrymore. “I have a life now. I made a life. I figured it out; you know, it took me a while.”

She revealed to her “Bad Girls” co-stars that she “moved down” to her home state of South Carolina and now lives in “a community that has a lot of people my age, so it makes it really easy to socialize”

MacDowell also said she counts it as a “great fortune” that she loves to exercise, but that exercising has brought on symptoms that made her feel like she was “literally falling apart.”

She revealed that she rode her peloton “like a crazy person” and realized that using a stationary bike was “not right for my body.”

“I ended up with bad knees and a bad hip and … I thought I was literally falling apart like I was going to have to get new pieces,” she said. “But the good news is my bits are fine. My knees are fine except for aging. They’ve aged. I work really hard now and do Pt. I’m not falling apart.”

Andie MacDowell explains living with Piriformis syndrome

She went on to open up about having Piriformis syndrome, which she described as a symptom where “a muscle kind of squeezes down on my sciatic nerve and it shoots down my leg.”

“I thought I was going to have a hip replacement. Thank God my hips are fine. I have to work my little little bottom and my hips. I have to work my bottom and work my hip. I just do it every day,” she said. “And it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s a miracle. It really is.”

Per National Institutes of Healththe condition “occurs when the piriformis muscles in the buttocks press on the sciatic nerve” and is “primarily associated with sciatica.” As Dr. Robert H. Shmerling explained in a 2022 Harvard Health Publishing article“The piriformis muscle connects the lower vertebrae to the upper part of the leg. … Here the muscle and nerve are adjacent, and this proximity is why problems can develop..”

MacDowell has been outspoken about appreciating the changes that come with aging, as well as continuing to act into her 60s. While speaking at a Television Critics Association panel last year, she touched on the representation she brings to the screen.

“I think people my age often thank me because I still represent them and we get left out a lot,” MacDowell said. “I think women are grateful to still be on screen at my age.”

“I have a lot more freedom now at my age,” she said. “I think women go through a really difficult time after they turn 40 because the world starts chipping away at them. Men get taller as they get older and women don’t get taller. A lot of women in their 50s ‘s and ’60s struggle with It.