Jennifer Esposito is getting candid with Oprah Winfrey about one of the scariest moments of her life.
Sitting down with the talk show icon for OWN’s “Where Are They Now?” the actress says that doctors ignored her plea for help when symptoms of her then-undiagnosed Celiac disease became too severe to ignore.
After having a tooth fall out on set, a concerned Melissa McCarthy, who was her “Samantha Who” co-star at the time, told her “‘Something is wrong, you are ill.”
“I know. But what do you do when people aren’t listening?” Esposito replied.
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After returning to seek medical treatment for the unknown illness, Esposito was instead placed in a psychiatric ward. “…I went back to the doctor and I said, ‘Please, I need help. Please keep me here because I’m jumping out of my skin,’ ” she recalls.
“I thought I was going to be checked in to the hospital, and they checked me in to the psych ward,” she continues. “And I’m thinking, ‘How did I get here? This is a problem with my system, this is not a problem with my brain.’ I was almost dead – my hair was falling out, my eyelashes fell off, my fingernails were falling off. I was bad.”
Esposito’s interview airs this Saturday on OWN.