Debby Ryan Opens Up About Life-Altering Brain Injury & Struggles With Migraines

Former Disney star Debby Ryan, best known for playing Bailey Pickett on The Suite Life on Deck alongside Dylan and Cole Sprouse and Jessie Prescott on Jessie, as well as starring in Netflix’s Insatiable, appeared on Mythical Kitchen’s Last Meals, where she opened up about being a “migraine warrior” after suffering a “life-altering brain injury.”

While promoting The Sun Never Sets, in which she stars alongside Dakota Fanning, Ryan sat down to reveal what she would choose for her last meal. But as she worked her way through the first course — buffalo chicken dip, a tomato sandwich on shokupan, her grandmother’s lasagna with an extra sidecar of sauce, classic German currywurst, and lime tortilla chips with extra watery salsa — the conversation turned to her struggles with migraines and the brain injury that made them significantly worse.

As the two got into Ryan’s very specific food preferences, Ryan explained that some of that specificity comes from how intensely she experiences the world. “I’m a migraine warrior, and quite often the world is really loud. It’s really too bright. It’s too, there’s a lot going on,” said the Disney Channel alum to host Josh Scherer. “Specifically, I would say after the fifth concussion, the brain injuries make things significantly worse.

“I had a pretty crazy life-altering brain injury a few years ago, and I was out of commission for six months. And I went to this neurological rehab for six months, went and did this fringe science treatment that was really sci-fi and crazy, and I’ve done it a couple times, and it kind of got me back online, but there are some things that just did not come back,” she revealed. “The brain injury that I had was not a blunt. The first four, that wasn’t a joke, unfortunately. Those ones were like an incident. The fifth one was sustained shaking [of] over a minute of time.”

“There’s sort of pre-incident Debby and post-incident Debby, which maybe is how I should have organized my meals,” said Ryan. “The brain of it all is that quite often I can just see better or think better with my eyes closed.”

“I feel really fortunate that I have an amazing team of people around me who sort of reminded me who I am and was, and also held a lot of space for that to change, potentially permanently, and love me through that.”