Rebecca Gayheart Details the First ALS Symptom She Noticed Before Eric Dane’s Diagnosis

Rebecca Gayheart was concerned about her ex-husband Eric Dane’s headaches before his ALS diagnosis.

The actress told Drew Barrymore on “Personal Spaces” on Wednesday that this symptom was the first she noticed.

“He never had a single headache in all the years we were married or dating,” the 55-year-old former model explained, noting that he started “complaining” about weakness in his hand “a few months” before.

“I said to myself, ‘Eric, you never have a headache. You’ve never taken Advil. What are you talking about, a headache? You don’t have a headache,'” she recalls.

At the time, Dane simply thought he had “slept on (her) neck in a funny way.”

Gayheart noted, “It continued. That wasn’t part of it. So there were definitely signs, but nothing was so bad that you really wanted to stop and pay attention to it.”

Dane was diagnosed with ALS in 2024 and lost his battle with the disease in February.

The Grey’s Anatomy alum wrote in his posthumous memoir, My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments, that his first symptom was difficulty using chopsticks while enjoying a sushi dinner.

“Suddenly, I can no longer handle the chopsticks with my right hand,” he recalls in the book released Tuesday. “My hand tingles, then my fingers go numb.”

The actor initially thought he was “texting too much.”

However, three weeks later Dane’s weakness became “worse” until he could no longer “grip chopsticks at all”.

The “Euphoria” alum then spent months being “transported from doctor to doctor and undergoing a battery of tests,” he told readers.

He was misdiagnosed with multifocal motor neuropathy, “a rare autoimmune disease causing extreme muscle weakness” with treatment “90% effective.”

Dane’s medical team became “scared” when he didn’t respond to treatment.

Nine months later – after a lumbar puncture, spinal fluid extraction and brain scans – he received his diagnosis.

The late “Last Ship” star made the news public in April 2025, the same month he and Gayheart filed to have their divorce annulled.

Gayheart explained Tuesday that even though they weren’t together romantically, they kept their family “intact” for their daughters Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14.