Actress Tamala Jones is opening up about the brain aneurysm she has battled with throughout her life and how it impacted her 30-year career.
The Wood actress appeared on The Tamron Hall Show last week to promote the new Lifetime movie she executive produced and stars in, Every Breath She Takes. While discussing her experience navigating Hollywood for the last three decades, she spoke candidly about a life-changing health scare caused by her brain aneurysm.
“I was born with it,” Jones revealed. “I wasn’t expecting that, and no one else was.”
She went on to describe the pain caused by the aneurysm.
“It was a headache that happened for two weeks straight,” she explained. “I was taking all the sinus medicine and Tylenol. [I] probably should of took an aspirin, and it kept going.”
She experienced another aneurysm while filming season four of For Your Love over 20 years ago.
“One morning, I woke up; I didn’t have any balance. I felt like I had to urinate really bad, and I stumbled to the toilet, nothing came out,” Jones recalled.
“My head started hurting really bad, and then I hit the floor. When I got up, the right side of my body was numb.”
Determined to get to work, Jones pushed past the pain she was feeling and drove to set.
“I got in the car, not realizing that this was done. My right foot was so heavy, I had to put my left foot on the brake and manually move this off the gas pedal,” she explained. “I drove to work, left foot, left hand.”
Jones recalled still being required to work, despite her health issues. After a long workday, she went to see a doctor.
“I got to the hospital, and the doctor was like, ‘I am in awe that you’re alive. Let alone worked a whole day,’” she recalled.
Since having the health scare, Jones has made it her mission to educate others about the realities of brain aneurysms.
“I wasn’t sleeping or eating properly. I was overworked,” she told the Academy of Neurology in 2014. “I think in some ways my experience was a wake-up call to take better care of myself.”
“If I can help one person recognize the symptoms of a brain aneurysm and get help, then I will have made a difference.”