Photo: All rights reserved.

Sarah Hyland

Sarah Hyland has confessed she was "very, very, very close" to taking her own life after her first kidney transplant failed.

The Modern Family star was born with kidney dysplasia and had her first transplant in 2012, when she received a kidney from her dad. However, in 2016, her body began to reject the organ and her brother Ian eventually stepped in and donated his kidney, which she received in September 2017.

When she went public with her health news in Self magazine in December, Sarah revealed she contemplated suicide before the second transplant because she feared a rejection would happen again, and during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Friday, the 28-year-old revealed that she came so close to taking her own life she began mentally writing notes to her family and friends.

"After 26/27 years of just always being sick and being in chronic pain every single day and you don't know when you're going to have the next good day, it's really, really hard," she explained. "I would write letters in my head to loved ones of why I did it and my reasoning behind it, how it was nobody's fault. I didn't want to write it down on paper because I didn't want anybody to find it. That's how serious I was... I was very, very, very close."

When asked how she turned things around, Sarah revealed that it happened when she finally decided to verbalize her suicidal thoughts to a friend.

"Just saying it out loud helped immensely because I kept it to myself for months and months at a time," she said. "I didn't want anybody to know that I was that close, because if they knew they would try to persuade me... But I think talking to someone and saying it out loud really, really makes it sound almost ridiculous and it puts it into perspective."