Andie MacDowell thought she needed a hip replacement — then discovered a health condition

Andie MacDowell is living the empty-nester life, and it’s come with ups and downs.

While promoting the third season of her Hallmark series “The Way Home” on “The Drew Barrymore Show” Thursday, the 66-year-old “Groundhog Day” star admitted that she’s “had to work really hard on my independence,” and received a dose of brutal honest from daughter Margaret Qualley.

“Margaret basically told me I needed to get a life. She was right,” MacDowell told Barrymore. “I do have a life now. I created a life. I figured it out; you know, it took me a while.”

She revealed to her “Bad Girls” co-star that she’d “moved down” to her home state of South Carolina and now lives in “a community that has a lot of people my age, so it makes it really easy to socialize.”

MacDowell also said she counts it as a “great fortune” that she loves to work out, but exercising has brought on symptoms that made her feel like she was “literally falling apart.”

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She revealed she was riding her Peloton “like a crazy person” and realized that using a stationary bike was “not appropriate for my body.”

“I ended up with bad knees and a bad hip, and … I thought I was literally falling apart, like I was gonna have to get new pieces,” she said. “But the good news is my pieces are fine. My knees are good except for aging. They’ve aged. I’m working out really hard now doing PT. I’m not falling apart.”

Andie MacDowell explains living with piriformis syndrome

She went on to open up about having piriformis syndrome, which she described as a symptom in which “a muscle kind of clamps down on my sciatic nerve and it was shooting down my leg.”

“I thought I was gonna have to have hip replacement. Thank God my hips are fine. I have to work my tiny little bottom and my hips. I have to work the bottom and work my hip. I just do it every day,” she said. “And it doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s a miracle. It really is.”

Per the National Institutes of Health, the condition “occurs when the piriformis muscle in the buttocks presses on the sciatic nerve” and is “primarily associated with sciatica.” As Dr. Robert H. Shmerling explained in a 2022 Harvard Health Publishing article, “The piriformis muscle connects the lowermost vertebrae with the upper part of the leg. … Here, the muscle and nerve are adjacent and this proximity is why trouble can develop..”

MacDowell has been outspoken about appreciating the changes that come with aging, as well as continuing to act into her 60s. While speaking at a Television Critics Association panel last year, she touched on the representation she brings to the screen.

“I think people my age often thank me, because I’m still representing them and we get left out a lot,” MacDowell said. “I think that women are thankful to still be on the screen at my age.”

“I have a lot more freedom now in my age,” she said. “I think women go through a really difficult time after they turn 40, because the world starts to chip them away. Men get elevated as they age, and women don’t get elevated. A lot of women in their 50s and 60s struggle with that. But the great thing about where I am now is that I don’t have to struggle to be (myself).”