Jenifer Lewis recalls learning how to walk again after near-fatal fall: 'I couldn't remember what to do'

The "Black-ish" actress discussed her long journey to recovery in an emotional interview with Tamron Hall.

Jenifer Lewis was determined to get back on her feet after a near-fatal accident in Africa two years ago, but her recovery journey has not been easy.

In an emotional appearance on Tamron Hall's eponymous daytime talk show Friday, the Black-ish and Princess and the Frog actress opened up about having to relearn how to walk following her fall from a 10-foot a balcony during a trip to the Serengeti.

"In Nairobi, when they asked me to walk in the parallel bars, I couldn't remember how to walk. I couldn't remember how to put one foot— I couldn't remember what to do," Lewis recalled. "He said, 'Ma'am, ma'am, you must walk here now. Come walk here.' I was like, 'How do I do that?'"

She continued: "I sat down in the wheelchair and I sobbed. I heard myself say, 'You will get up. You will get up, you will, or I will kill you myself. Now get up. Get up. You get up and you walk. Come on, baby.' I walked."

Lewis recounted the harrowing accident for the first time in an interview with Robin Roberts last month, sharing that she fell into a dry ravine full of boulders and sharp rocks with a lion nearby.

"When the sun sets in the Serengeti, there are no streetlights. It is pitch-black," Lewis told Roberts. "I was escorted to the lodge, my room, but I wasn't given a tour. I should've been given tour. 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."

Noting that she was "in shock," Lewis added, "My right hip took the impact, my shoulder went up against a stone. A lightning bolt went through my mind's eye right here. 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.' Then, I called for my friend, Lori. It was hard to even take a big breath to scream."

When her friend left the scene to get help, Lewis heard a lion roar nearby. "My last thought, because I am Jenifer Lewis, was, what a headline," she said with a laugh. "The king at the queen. Pieces of Jenifer Lewis' body being flown back to the States."

Elsewhere in her interview with Hall, Lewis commended her surgeon and his staff in Nairobi. "Ten hours he worked on me," an overcome Lewis said. "Three blood transfusions. And his wife came into surgery, into ICU, and prayed for me."

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