This Grey's Anatomy Star's Daughter Had A Medical Mystery Of Her Own

Chandra Wilson made a name for herself thanks to "Grey's Anatomy," in which she portrays the blunt Dr. Miranda Bailey. Clad in her surgeon coat, Wilson and her fellow co-stars have grown accustomed to handling strange cases on the set of the ABC drama. Shocking Wilson's Bailey is no easy feat, but even she was perplexed to see the X-ray of a man who had swallowed not one, but 10 Judy doll heads in the second episode of Season 2, as Grey's Anatomy Fandom detailed. Bailey operated on the patient, removing head by head, while finding time to comment on them. One of them, she said, even looked like Dr. Meredith Grey, played by Ellen Pompeo.

In Season 7, Wilson once again saw herself responsible for another unusual case. This time, it wasn't self-imposed, though. Wilson was tasked with operating on a patient suffering from HPV, which was aggravated by an immune deficiency that allowed warts to cover his body, particularly his hands, as Digital Spy noted. While Bailey has the stomach to face any sort of medical emergency the human body could come up with, she proved to be no match for the spider that crawled out from the patient's skin lesions as she removed them. Even the toughest surgeons have weak spots, it turns out.

However, not all of the cases Wilson worked on in "Grey's Anatomy" were confined to the realm of fiction. In Season 9, Wilson brought her own very real medical mystery to the show.

In 2010, Chandra Wilson embarked on a long journey to try to help her teenaged daughter, Sarina. Early that year, the girl suffered her first bout of chronic vomiting. It could have been food poisoning or a stomach bug, she thought. But a few weeks later, Sarina had another episode. And then another, Wilson and Sarina told WPVI-TV in 2011. "As the days went by, I just kept on throwing up and I got dehydrated. Wouldn't eat, wouldn't drink," Sarina explained. 

Wilson, a mother of three, took Sarina to different specialists, but none could pin down what was happening to Sarina. "She had every kind of scan you could think of, you know, upper GI's and CT scans, and delayed gastric emptying tests, and you know, blood work constantly," Wilson said. After nearly a year of tests and a process of elimination, doctors diagnosed Sarina with cyclic vomiting syndrome, or CVS, a condition with no apparent cause and believed to be related to migraine, according to Mayo Clinic. 

In a 2017 interview with "Good Morning America," Wilson pulled out a binder about four inches thick bursting with papers. "When you are the parent of someone who is a chronic pain sufferer, you end up creating these binders for all of the hospital stays." The condition went on to mark not only Sarina's life, but also Wilson's, as she became a CVS activist and even brought Sarina's story to the set of "Grey's Anatomy."

Ahead of 2012's Season 9 of "Grey's Anatomy," Chandra Wilson asked creator Shonda Rhimes what she thought about featuring a patient with cyclic vomiting syndrome on the show. Rhimes agreed. Wilson not only starred in "Second Opinion," but also directed it. Wilson was inspired to pitch the idea after attending a Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome Association conference, where patients suggested it to her. "Weighing the pros, I decided that here was a vehicle to say the name Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome out loud on national television to up to 10 million viewers," she wrote in a note on CVSA's website.

To Wilson, the effects of her decision were immediately apparent. Just one day after the episode aired, the CVSA noticed an increase in phone calls, hits to its website, and comments on its social media pages, Wilson said in her note. "Being able to be on 'Grey's Anatomy' with all those people able to watch it and hear it and say, 'Oh my God, that's what that is! I've heard of that, that's my kid, that's my husband, that's my aunt,' that means so much," she said on "Good Morning America" in 2017. "Because I just remember what it meant to us."

Ever since Sarina was diagnosed in 2011, Wilson has served as a spokesperson and ambassador for CVSA and CureMito!, a nonprofit that raises awareness and funds for mitochondrial diseases, as CVS is thought to be caused by mitochondrial dysfunction, according to its website.