“Blue Bloods” actor dies suddenly at age 30 hue01

Jennifer Esposito knows now that she has celiac disease, but she struggled to find a diagnosis for the many symptoms that she was experiencing for years before the news came. Even in the days immediately afterward, she had a tough time.

“When I stopped the gluten and I went through this detox, I couldn’t even tell you,” she recalled Tuesday on the Heal Squad x Maria Menounos podcast. “They had me on four Klonopin a day, and I was still a trembling mess. I was literally sleeping in my kitchen, because it was the only place that didn’t have a window, because the stimulus from the light would make me tremble and shake, like I couldn’t talk. It was horrendous.”

That’s when she decided to tell a doctor, who was affiliated with a major hospital and was studying Esposito, that she needed mental help.

“So when I went to him this particular day,” Esposito recalled, “I said, ‘Doctor, you got to keep me here because I’m jumping out of my skin. I’m going to jump out the window.’”

She checked in as “Betty Franklin,” a moniker taken from the names of her dogs.

“Within a half an hour, I was wheeled upstairs to the psych ward,” Esposito said. “I will say it was seven of the most excruciating hours of my entire life, because I was yet again pleading for my sanity.”

She was there, she said, because she had threatened to harm herself. By then, she had experienced serious depression for years, as she looked for relief.