While millions saw her as a sex symbol, Pamela Anderson was reckoning with a brutal thought: she might not live to see her children grow up.
In 2002, she publicly revealed that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, an infection that affects the liver. According to her account, she contracted it after sharing a tattoo needle with her then-husband, Tommy Lee.
The blow was enormous. At the time, the treatments available today did not yet exist, and a doctor even told her she might have around a decade of life left.
Pamela immediately thought of Brandon and Dylan, her two children. Years later, she would acknowledge that prognosis influenced many of the decisions she made and the way she began to look at her future.
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
With the development of new treatments, in 2015 she was able to access a therapy that ultimately eliminated the virus from her body. That same year, she announced she was cured, after living with the diagnosis for more than a decade.
In 2026, she spoke about it again while receiving an award from amfAR in Venice, and summed up that whole journey with a phrase very different from what she might have imagined back then: “I’m not a victim, I’m a victor”.
What once seemed like a countdown became a second chance that Pamela lived to experience.