Actress Sarah Hyland, who plays Haley Dunphy on the ABC comedy, recently revealed she's been battling a kidney disease since she was a little girl.
At age 9, she was diagnosed with abnormal kidney development. Her condition left her in pain, exhausted, and in desperate need of a transplant. Without a donor, the 21-year-old faced a life on dialysis.
"I would be in a lot of pain a lot of the time. If I didn't get, like, 12 hours of sleep, it felt, like -- it felt, like, none at all," Hyland said.
She began the search for a donor, who ended up being closer than she thought. Her own father, actor Edward James Hyland, was a perfect match, and in April she underwent the transplant surgery.
Hyland will spend the summer recovering now that there's a break taping the show.
