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Joe Manganiello has opened up about a devastating seven-year battle with a mysterious illness that left him hospitalized, severely weakened and convinced he might not survive.
The 49-year-old actor details the ordeal in his upcoming memoir Bloodlines, revealing that his health began deteriorating shortly after his 2015 marriage to Sofía Vergara. He developed severe abdominal pain, ulcers in his digestive tract, fevers, blistering rashes, headaches and extreme fatigue.
"I was getting sicker and sicker," Manganiello recalls. Despite undergoing numerous tests and receiving medications commonly used to treat conditions such as Crohn's disease and colitis, doctors never reached a definitive diagnosis.
"None of them worked on me," he said. His condition became particularly critical during a 2016 hospitalization. In an excerpt from the memoir, Manganiello describes one night when he became convinced he was about to die.
"I realized that I would most likely not live to see the sunrise again," he wrote.
After his condition worsened, doctors performed emergency surgery and discovered that his intestine "had turned to pus and was about to explode. Had they not cut me open that morning, it would have ruptured, and I would have died immediately of sepsis," he wrote.
The ten-hour operation involved removing his large intestine and creating an opening in his abdomen to divert his small intestine, leaving him dependent on an ostomy bag. Over the course of his illness, Manganiello lost 60 pounds and underwent multiple procedures.
The physical ordeal also took a severe toll on his mental health. At one point, he said he had to give his gun away because he repeatedly thought about using it. His outlook changed after he adopted a sickly chihuahua named Bubbles.
"And then the dog came. I went from being the patient to the caretaker," he said.
Manganiello also turned to alternative approaches while searching for answers, eventually crediting a Santa Monica shaman's guidance about generational trauma with helping him move forward.
His struggles also coincided with the breakdown of his marriage to Vergara. He later found love with Caitlin O'Connor, who he says entered his life at a pivotal moment. "Caitlin came into my life at this point where it was obvious to me that [she] was the direction to go," he said.
Now off medication and describing himself as symptom-free, Manganiello is looking toward a future he once feared he would never have.
