Carrie Ann Inaba conversation at Televerse 26 put her off-camera life in plain terms. The Dancing with the Stars judge said Sjögren's disease leaves her in constant pain, and the daily toll reaches well beyond the set.
“It’s debilitating. And so I am always in pain,” she said. Inaba also said she is in sweatpants most of the time when she is not on camera, and that some days she has not showered in three days while walking her dogs around her neighborhood.
Televerse 26 and the diagnosis
Sjögren's disease is an autoimmune condition that most often affects glands that make moisture in the eyes and mouth, leading to fewer tears and less saliva. Inaba said her symptoms started with dry eyes, then added a lot of pain, and that the condition is not limited to moisture glands. “A lot of people think Sjögren's disease is just dry eyes and your moisture glands, but it's actually a whole systemic condition and can affect your organs as well, and I've had some organ interactions,” she said.
It took doctors 10 years to diagnose her, and she said it took another 10 to 15 years to come to peace with living with the disease forever. That timeline turns her latest remarks into more than a health update; it shows how long a public figure can spend managing symptoms before the diagnosis itself starts to make sense.
Life off camera
“My life is very unglamorous for the most part,” Inaba said, adding that people need to understand what life looks like behind closed doors. She said people are shown “very hyper-realistic versions of people” that are not true, and that “we’re all going through something.”
That bluntness is the point. Inaba is a public television personality, but she said her off-camera routine is shaped by energy management, limited stamina, and the reality that she has not been able to do as much lately. For readers dealing with the same disease, that is the practical takeaway: the work is often not about pushing harder, but about doing less and pacing the day around what the body allows.
April and what follows
In April, Inaba said on Instagram that she suffered a medical emergency while en route to New York, giving her latest interview extra weight because it adds a first-person account to a health issue she had already flagged publicly. She said Sjögren's disease has also given her more compassion and empathy, and that it makes her a better judge because she can feel what people are going through.
The open question is not whether she is still living with the disease; she said she is. The real issue now is how much she can keep taking on while managing constant pain and a systemic condition that has already changed the way she works, rests, and gets through an ordinary day.
