Jenifer Lewis was left sobbing in a wheelchair after a terrible fall robbed her of the ability to walk.
The “Black-ish” actor plunged 10 feet from a hotel balcony during a holiday in Africa two years ago. She underwent intensive rehabilitation therapy to get her back on her feet, and Lewis has admitted she was an emotional wreck as she attempted to push through the pain.
“In Nairobi, when they asked me to walk, you know the parallel bars, I couldn’t remember how to walk … ‘How do you do that?’ … I sat down in the wheelchair, and I sobbed. And I heard myself say, ‘You will get up, you will get up, and you will walk — or I’ll kill you myself. You get up and you walk. Come on, baby.’ And I walked,” Lewis explained during an upcoming appearance on the “Tamron Hall Show.”
Lewis previously opened up about the accident in an interview with Robin Roberts last month, revealing the fall left her with devastating injuries.
“When the sun sets in the Serengeti, there are no streetlights. It is pitch black. I was escorted to the lodge, my room, but I wasn’t given a tour. I should’ve been given a tour,” she recalled.
“I laid out my safari clothes, and I saw the infinity pool out on my deck, so I went out. I was just taking in the fact that I was back in the Serengeti once again, and I’m walking, and all of a sudden – bam – I had fallen 10 feet into a dry ravine full of boulders and stones and sharp rocks,” she said.
“Of course, I was in shock. My right hip took the impact, my shoulder went up against a stone. A lightning bolt went through my mind’s eye right here,” Lewis continued.
“In pitch black, I didn’t know I was falling. Nothing would move. So, I laid there, I said, ‘Move your body, baby, come on Jenny, move your body’ … I heard a lion roar. My last thought, because I am Jenifer Lewis, was, what a headline: The king ate the queen. Pieces of Jenifer Lewis’ body being flown back to the States,” she said.
