Jenna Jameson Discusses Being Given a Year to Live, Busting Herself Out of the Hospital (Exclusive)

Jenna Jameson is feeling good after her health scare. ET’s Deidre Behar spoke to the 49-year-old former adult film star, who opened up about being hospitalized for nine months and how she took her health into her own hands.

“It started very suddenly,” Jameson told ET of her health woes. “I was doing very well and then I just started collapsing and lost my ability to walk and they admitted me into the hospital. I think I spent about nine months in the hospital.”

During her hospital stay, doctors “could not put their finger on what it was” and ended up diagnosing her “with a multitude of things” including Guillain-Barré syndrome and blood cancer. At one point, she was told she had one year to live.

“When I was first told that I didn’t have very long to live, I think I just balled up,” she admitted. “I didn’t really know how to digest that.”

Instead of accepting her prognosis, Jameson “took myself out of the situation and I said, ‘I’m not going to let this happen. I refuse. I’m not going to go down like that.'”

“I finally got to the point where I was like, ‘I have to take my health into my own hands,’ so I put myself in a wheelchair and I wheeled myself out of the hospital,” Jameson said. “… I ended up just taking everything into my own hands and making it happen. I knew that I still had so much life left to live.”

As for what prompted her to break herself out of the hospital, it was one simple fact: “I wasn’t seeing any progression. I wasn’t feeling better.”

“It was around nine months that I was in the hospital. I was just feeling stagnant,” she said. “They were just testing me and taking blood, and I just felt terrible. I think a lot of it was the emotional aspect of being sequestered, and nobody’s coming to see you, and just not knowing what’s going on around you. I just decided, good or bad, I’m getting out of here and I’m going to go at it holistically.”

Since Jameson made that decision, she’s regained her ability to walk and improved her memory function.

“I was having a lot of memory issues and I lost years and years and years of my life, so I started going to a cognitive therapist that puts you through puzzles and all these things, and everything just started reconnecting,” Jameson said, before sharing how she’s changed her diet since her health scare.

“I feel myself coming back to life when I eat correctly, keto wise. I feel energetic. Intermittent fasting, for me, what it does is it kind of resets my metabolism,” she said. “Coming out of the hospital and being on so many medications that they had me on, once I started intermittent fasting… I felt my all of my nerve endings starting to fire up again.”

Now, Jameson told ET, “I finally feel like sunshine again.”

“I don’t think I’m at 100 percent. I think I’m running under about 75 percent. So, I mean, coming from a 10 percent, I’m feeling really good. I’m training every other day. I’m eating perfectly. I also have a great partner,” she said of Jessi Lawless, with whom she tied the knot with in June. “I am married and I’m just really happy.”

As for what she learned from the whole ordeal, Jameson said, “I think it’s an important message to people that sometimes you have to take your health into your own hands and just do what feels right to you, because doctors don’t know everything. Follow your heart.”

It’s not just Jameson’s health that’s on the upswing, it’s her career too. In fact, the former adult film star is appearing in A&E’s Secrets of Penthouse docuseries, which follows the rise and fall of Bob Guccione, the founder of the publication.

“I would sneak into my dad’s closet and look at his magazines and he would always have Penthouse and other magazines that were a little less raunchy. I was drawn to Penthouse because there was something so honest about it. Oddly enough, I really liked the articles also,” she said. “… I just loved the stories and it kind of built my imagination when it came to erotic novels, which I parlayed into my career. Penthouse was an integral part of forming me as Jenna Jameson.”

Secrets of Penthouse will air Monday, Sept. 4 and Tuesday, Sept. 5 at 9/8c. Episodes will also be available to stream the next day.

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