Joe Manganiello spent seven years getting treatment for an illness doctors couldn’t definitively name.
The 49-year-old actor told People that it began with abdominal pain so severe he couldn’t walk. More symptoms followed, including fevers, rashes, fatigue, and rectal bleeding. He writes about the experience in his memoir, Bloodlines, out October 13.
“I was getting sicker and sicker,” the True Blood star recalled. He says he lost 60 pounds over the course of the illness and, in 2016, needed emergency surgery to remove part of his intestines.
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Trying to Manage the Pain
Manganiello describes his illness as autoimmune, when the immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy tissues.
“[Autoimmune] conditions are a dumping ground for things [doctors] don’t understand,” he said. “They start running you through this gauntlet of drugs.”
Doctors prescribed medication for nerve pain and drugs used to treat Crohn’s disease and colitis, but Manganiello says he never received a conclusive diagnosis.
“None of them worked on me,” he said.
To manage the pain, he used hydrocodone pills, fentanyl patches, and marijuana — something he struggled with after 13 years of sobriety. “I didn’t feel like I deserved to say that I was sober,” he recalled. “[But] I had to put the pain and the condition first.”
Moving Forward After Years of Illness
Manganiello says he is now symptom-free and off medication. He also underwent another surgery to reconnect his digestive tract after using an ostomy bag.
He credits working with a shaman and confronting his family’s history of trauma with helping him recover. (That’s his explanation, but it doesn’t tell us whether those experiences changed the course of his illness.)
“Whatever chains there were to the past suffering of my ancestors, they were completely broken,” he said. “There’s not an ounce of fear in me about moving forward with my life.”
