Jenifer Lewis is opening up more about her near-death experience after falling from a 10-foot balcony while vacationing in Tanzania in 2022.
The actress stopped by The Tamron Hall Show on Friday where she revealed that following her fall in the Serengeti, she couldn’t remember how to walk.
“In Nairobi, when they asked me to walk, you know the parallel bars? I couldn’t remember how to walk,” she told the talk show host while getting emotional. “I couldn’t remember how to put one foot. I didn’t even… I couldn’t remember what to do. He said, ‘Mum, mum, you must walk here now. Come. Walk here.’ I was like, ‘How do you do that?'”
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Lewis explained she struggled to overcome it but took steps forward little by little because she was determined to get better. She recalled sitting down in her wheelchair and sobbing until she heard herself say “You’ll get up. You’ll get up, and you’ll walk, or I’ll kill you myself. Now get up. Get up. You get up and you walk. Come on, baby.” And she walked.
The black-ish star first revealed the news that she had fallen off the balcony during a March interview with Good Morning America. She shared that she had gone onto the balcony to to get a closer look at the infinity pool and suddenly fell 10 feet into a dry ravine full of boulders, stones and sharp rocks.
She noted that she was in pain and in shock over what had just happened. “My right hip took the impact. My shoulder went up against the stone. A lightning bolt went through my mind’s eye,” the This Is Me…Now: A Love Story actress added. “In pitch black, I didn’t know I was falling. Nothing would move.”
After she called to her friend Lori, who had gone on the trip with her, for help, she heard a lion roar and remembered thinking she was going to die. “My last thought, because I am Jenifer Lewis, was, ‘What a headline,'” she told Robin Roberts at the time, laughing. “‘The king ate the queen: Pieces of Jenifer Lewis’ body being flown back to the states.'”
