On Nov. 28, only an hour before her performance at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, for Black Friday, JoJo was hospitalized for severe abdominal pain.
“Long story short, every time that I’ve been dancing the last couple of days, or even just walking, anything, my stomach would really, really hurt,” JoJo explained in a Nov. 29 TikTok video.
“I don’t know why, but it passed, and so I was like, ‘Maybe it’s that time of the month. Maybe it’s a cramp. I don’t know,'” she said.
In the morning, before the performance, JoJo arrived at the Mall of America to prep and film content. But when she came back up to her room, she told her mom, “I’m going to have to get myself looked at when I get back home… This pain is really bad.”
Thinking it would pass, JoJo tried to rest on the bed, but pain continued to escalate to the point where she said, “I can’t breathe.”
She tried hopping in the bathtub to see if it would calm the pain down, and that “set it off 100 times worse.”
“So I got in the bathtub, and I was in it for maybe four minutes, and all of a sudden I was like, ‘I have to get out immediately,'” she said, “because I knew I was gonna black out, and I felt like I was gonna throw up.”
JoJo called her mom, Jessalynn Siwa, who helped her get dressed (because she could barely move) and call 911. Once at the hospital, her dad explained that, on her behalf, they were willing to follow the doctor’s orders, but they had a performance already scheduled.
Luckily, JoJo still performed, but the ultrasound revealed the cause of all that excruciating pain. “One of my ovaries had a cyst on it that burst and was bleeding into my stomach,” JoJo said. “So that’s what was causing the excruciating pain.”
JoJo assured fans that it should resolve itself, and she’s set for another checkup. She’s just expected to “keep it calm,” which will be difficult as she’s still working. “The good news is we know what it is, and I think that brought a lot of peace of mind to me,” she said. “Now I know what the pain is, and so I know [to] take a second. It’ll settle, and it’ll calm down.”
“Anytime it moves, even when I’m asleep and I roll over, it wakes me up because it hurts and cramps so bad because of the blood in the belly,” she said, before adding, “So, imagine the dancing.”
JoJo ended the conversation by saying that in the event she has another burst of pain or vomits, she might have to go back to the hospital, but she “should be okay.”
You can learn more about JoJo’s hospital experience here.