Kristin Chenoweth Reveals She Suffers From Asthma

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Kristin Chenoweth is going public about her battle with asthma in an interview on The Doctors.

The Tony Award-winning actress and Glee star, 45, told theshow's panel that she's suffered with the respiratory disorder for more than a decade after first noticing symptoms while living in New York City.

"Ten years ago -- around the time after 9/11 -- I began to suffer with not being able to get my breath and chronic chest colds that turned into walking pneumonia," said Chenoweth.

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But in an interview with The Associated Press, the actress says she wasn't correctly diagnosed for a few years and she initially thought she was suffering from bronchitis or other respiratory issues. "It was only after going to L.A. to do Bewitched and The West Wing that I really got sick. But I wasn't diagnosed with asthma," Chenoweth recalls. "It wasn't until I was doing the television series Pushing Daisies, that my doctor in Oklahoma diagnosed me."

Chenoweth -- who is going public to raise awareness of the illness and recently did a public service announcement to educate asthma sufferers -- says she now has to carry an inhaler at all times in case she needs it and that the diagnosis changed her life and affected her confidence as a performer. She recalled one scary encounter while appearing on Broadway in the 2010 revival of the musical Promises, Promises.

"I was onstage, literally in the second act in a pretty dramatic scene, I can literally feel it coming on, and I remember thinking, 'How am I going to deal with it? How am I going to get my breath? How am I going to get offstage? How am I going to get to my inhaler?' Luckily, I found a spot where it would make sense for me to exit and my dresser was there with an inhaler."

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Chenoweth suffered an injury while shooting on the New York set of The Good Wife in 2012. In the accident, she was hit by a piece of lighting equipment that knocked her out and slammed her to the ground, where her head hit a curb. She was hospitalized with the head injury and later revealed that the recovery process took several months.