Actress Tamala Jones has been in some of our favorite movies and TV shows. From being in the movies, The Wood and The Brothers with Morris Chestnut and Shemar Moore, plus numerous TV shows, her youthful face is a welcome sight on the big and small screen. On the hit television show Castle, actress Tamala Jones played the role of Lanie Parish, a smart, sarcastic medical examiner who solves some of New York City’s most heinous murders by unraveling complex medical mysteries.
In real life, Jones is committed to eradicating a different kind of villain: brain aneurysms. According to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, an estimated 6 million people in the United States live with an unruptured brain aneurysm.
Over a decade after being diagnosed with a ruptured brain aneurysm, actress Tamala Jones has made it her mission to educate the community on the importance of personal health. Surviving a swollen and spouted blood vessel at the young age of 23, Jones is a prime example that this medical condition can happen to anyone.
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After being overly self-conscious thinking herself to be weak for undergoing a possibly life-threatening condition, the Hollywood starlet recently decided to go public with her past health issues. Remembering the brutal pain and divine blessing of her aneurysm, Jones shares her near-fatal health scare in her own words.
“[I woke] up one morning with a massive headache; feeling like I had to use the bathroom, like I had to urinate really bad. When I got out of bed I had no balance. I was walking on my toes and I was stomping. I had no control over my body weight. I looked in the mirror and I’m telling you two seconds after I looked in that mirror I dropped and hit the floor.
I kept hearing myself tell myself, ‘Get up, get up now. Get up, get up, get up…,’ and I kind of woke up as if somebody shook me out of a sleep, and the whole right side of my body was numb. I called work and I told them, ‘Something’s wrong with me. I can’t come in. I have to go to the hospital.’ They told me, ‘You need to come into work. This is the last day of shooting for this season, and we don’t have time to wait for you to go to the doctor’s office.’”
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“I went to the hospital after work and the doctor thought that it was a miracle that I was even alive, walking or talking, or that I even worked an entire day before I got to him. After that, I started having seizures. I had MRIs [and] cat scans, and they found out that my aneurysm actually burst. Had it been on another side of my brain I probably would have been paralyzed forever—it was on the left side of my brain and was the size of a 50-cent piece. They said once that blood dried up I would get my feeling back.”
What Was Her Symptoms She Ignored?
“I had headaches for like three weeks. I took everything, and nothing helped—from sinus medicine to migraine medicine. I say that if you get it checked out right away when you have this headache and it’s continuously going and nothing works then you can save yourself. They can give you something to help you or they can remove it or whatever they need to do. But I felt like it was my duty as a survivor to speak about it.”
“At the time, I thought I was suffering from sinus headaches because we have a lot of sinus issues in my family,” Jones says. “Looking back, I should have seen my doctor then, because the headaches were persistent and felt as if someone were stretching a rubber band around my head and pulling it tighter every day. Even Tylenol didn’t help.”
For Jones, who experienced seizures while in the hospital, recovery took several months. An MRI revealed she had hemorrhaged on the right side of her brain, which left her paralyzed on that side. Her doctor told her that once the blood dried, she would regain function on the right side of her body.
What Is a Brain Aneurysm?
A brain aneurysm is a bulge or weakness in the wall of a blood vessel in the brain.
Causes:
The exact cause of most brain aneurysms is unknown. However, some risk factors include:
- High blood pressure
- Smoking
- Atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries)
- Trauma to the head
- Family history of aneurysms
- Certain genetic disorders
Types of Brain Aneurysms:
Saccular aneurysms: The most common type, they are round or oval-shaped bulges that typically form at a branch point in a blood vessel.
Fusiform aneurysms: Elongated bulges that affect a wider section of the blood vessel.
Dissecting aneurysms: Tears in the inner layers of the blood vessel wall.
Symptoms:
Many brain aneurysms do not cause any symptoms until they rupture. A ruptured aneurysm can lead to a sudden, severe headache, often described as the “worst headache of my life,””. Other symptoms may include:
Nausea and vomiting, Stiff neck, Confusion, Loss of consciousness, and Seizures.
Diagnosis:
Brain aneurysms can be diagnosed using imaging tests such as:
CT scan, MRI scan, and Cerebral angiography.
Treatment:
Treatment for brain aneurysms depends on whether they have ruptured or not.
Unruptured aneurysms: May be monitored closely with imaging or treated with surgery or endovascular coiling to prevent rupture.
Ruptured aneurysms: Require immediate medical attention to stop the bleeding and prevent further brain damage. Treatment options include surgery to clip the aneurysm, endovascular coiling, or medication to control blood pressure and prevent re-bleeding.
How She Eventually Recovered
“My mom and grandmother, Roxanne and Laverne Jones, took care of me and helped nurse me back to health,” Jones says. “The first few days were pretty much a blur—my mom and grandma would wake me up to feed me and bathe me. It took a full three months before I got my full strength back and was able to work again.”
Today, 16 years after being diagnosed with a ruptured brain aneurysm, Jones has signed on to become the national spokesperson for the Brain Aneurysm Foundation. She hopes to use her personal experience to raise awareness of aneurysms as well as funding for additional research.
“I didn’t go public with my story for many years because I didn’t want to show weakness or vulnerability, especially as I was trying to succeed as an actress,” Jones says. “Yet after hearing many stories of young people suffering from a brain aneurysm and dying, I wanted to share my story.”
“I mention the aneurysm to anybody that I can. Whenever I have a platform for people there that are listening. Because it’s something that happened to me and something that can happen to anybody in this world, if you are given warning then you can probably save your own life. So, I tell anybody. It doesn’t matter why I’m there speaking. I always bring up health some type of way—I segue into having a brain aneurysm at an early age. Whether it’s your heart or your head or your legs or your arms, if it’s too much pain, the doctor’s the only place to go. Not staying at home and wondering if this is ever going to go away. I just thought it was selfish of me not to even say what I survived or what I felt.”
