Joe Manganiello is completely stripping down to reveal how he reclaimed his body after undergoing multiple invasive medical procedures.
On Monday, October 19, the True Blood alum, 49, shared an Instagram carousel in which he covers his private parts with a towel while unveiling a huge dragon tattoo down the right side of his naked body. The 3-foot red-and-black body art stretches from the tip of Manganiello’s belly button all the way down to the top of his knee cap.
“In chapter four [of my new book Bloodlines], I related my struggle with the illness to my body sending out knights to fight a (western) dragon that didn’t exist,” he wrote via Instagram on Monday, October 19. “The soldiers would then punch holes throughout my body when they couldn’t find an enemy.”
He added, “The idea to cover my surgery scars with my first tattoo, a three foot dragon down my right side, was my effort to take back what little agency I felt that I had, and to signal to my body to stop attacking the dragon… because the (eastern) dragon was me…”
In his memoir, Manganiello writes about the seven-year health journey he experienced after collapsing on a Wilmington, North Carolina, film set in 2016. The actor said he never received a firm diagnosis from his doctors, though he was told he likely had an autoimmune condition.
Manganiello recalled experiencing a “night in hell” shortly after his collapse when his large intestine began to rupture.
“Rectal blood sprayed out, turning the bathroom floor into a crimson pool, staining the walls, the sink, and tile grout bright red,” he recalled. “My entire large 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.”
Manganiello writes in Bloodlines that his then-wife, Sofía Vergara, saved his life by making a “brutal but lifesaving decision to allow my entire large intestine to be removed and a hole to be cut into my abdomen to divert my small intestine” into an ostomy bag. (An ostomy bag is a medical device that collects human waste from a surgically created opening in the abdomen called a stoma.)
The next few months were spent enduring “several nervous breakdowns” as Manganiello dropped from 235 pounds to just 176 while he adjusted to his new reality. The actor claimed that his marriage to Vergara, 54, broke down at the same time because it became “devoid of any emotionality whatsoever.” (Manganiello filed for divorce in Los Angeles County Superior Court in July 2023. He and Vergara settled their divorce the following April.)
When Manganiello struggled to receive a formal diagnosis from Western medicine, he ultimately turned to alternative treatments that he credited with healing him.
“In order to heal, my mind, my body, my spirit all had to align and I needed to become open to some really radical and unorthodox techniques and ideas that lied beyond the boundaries of western medicine,” he shared with fans via Instagram in June.
Bloodlines is available now at all booksellers.
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