A drunken fall might be the oldest story in the book — but for Howie Mandel’s wife, the culprit behind her recent fall and hospitalization was marijuana, not alcohol.
Terry Mandel was concerned that people would assume she was drunk when she took a spill and split her head in the couple’s Las Vegas hotel room, after the comic described the incident on “Live With Kelly and Mark.” It was an assumption she apparently was keen to avoid.
“She wasn’t drunk,” he clarified Tuesday on “TMZ Live.” “She’s so worried that people are going to intervene … she doesn’t have an alcohol problem. I’m gonna tell you the truth — she took gummies.”
After a night on the town in February, Terry got out of bed at their hotel in the middle of the night and bumped into a wall, then fell and hit her face on the wainscoting, tearing open her forehead and breaking her cheek.
“I wake up, I turn on the light, I looked around the bed,” Howie Mandel said on “Kelly and Mark.” “She’s in the corner face down, and I didn’t know she cut her head, but blood is wheeling out and I just, I freaked out!”
The “America’s Got Talent” judge rushed to pick her up and get her back on the bed, trying to mop up the blood with towels. When she asked for ice, he improvised with a cold soda can — which his wife promptly threw across the room, he said, because it hurt her face.
It was only when her face was uncovered that the comedian realized he could “actually see her skull” through the gash in her forehead.
“I went, ‘Oh, my God. This is the love of my life. This is my everything. That’s anything I have,’” he said. “So I freaked and I call down the front desk, I go, ‘You gotta call 911!’”
Terry is now stitched up, rested and recovered, much to Howie’s relief. Moral of the story? Substances and wainscoting don’t mix.
