Jenelle Evans’ Year of Medical Maladies: A Review
Jenelle Evans is giving Teen Mom 2 fans whiplash with how quickly everything is changing around the former reality TV star. One minute she’s in the hospital looking for a friend to bring her underwear, and the next she’s headed to New York. Before social media followers can catch their collective breath, she’s talking new business ventures, and now she’s moved on to announcing she is having surgery. This week, Jenelle Evans broke up her New York Fashion Week content to announce she’ll be dealing with another medical issue. She’s having sinus surgery soon. It’s far from her first medical malady this year. Let’s take a look back at all that has physically ailed Evans this year (and in the past).
Jenelle Evans is having sinus surgery
Jenelle Evans spent several days in New York City for New York Fashion Week recently. Along for the ride were Ensley Eason and Kaiser Griffith, two of Evans’ three children. Now that the family is back home in Las Vegas, they are settling back into their routine, and Evans is back on the hunt for medical relief.
Evans recently took to X (formerly Twitter) to reveal that she will be undergoing surgery on her sinuses next week. The mother of three claims she’s had hearing issues and sinus issues for years, with doctors watching a cyst as it grew. Now, she says, it’s time to have surgery to remove the cyst and, hopefully, alleviate some of the symptoms she’s been experiencing.
Before that, she spent a week in a hospital for bronchitis
The sinus surgery is new, but her medical maladies are not. Earlier this month, Jenelle Evans spent five days in the hospital after being diagnosed with bronchitis. She spent the week before being admitted complaining of a cough and difficulty breathing. During her stay, she kept her followers updated via Instagram and TikTok. While she was ill, she happily answered questions and shared several working theories about what ailed her.
Evans claimed, at one point, that doctors were considering asthma as the cause of her breathing troubles. She was eventually sent home with a nebulizer, several medications, and an inhaler. While she continued to convalesce at home for a few more days, it wasn’t long before she was back in action and jetting off to various events. There has been no additional update on her asthma diagnosis.
She also claims to have broken her wrist in recent weeks
Before surgery plans and even her hospitalization, Evans took to Instagram to claim she was suffering from a painful arm injury. According to the former reality TV star, she injured herself while out on the town in Las Vegas, though she never elaborated on how. She took to her Instagram stories to share photos of her injury, claiming her wrist was swollen and bruised. It appeared to be neither of those things.
Regardless, she headed to urgent care, where she says she was diagnosed with a broken wrist and given an ACE bandage. She later claimed an MRI was needed to diagnose the alleged fracture. She’s worn a brace or an ACE bandage off and on for several weeks. She was never in a cast and has largely stopped mentioning her arm.
A knee injury, esophageal spasms, cysts, and fibromyalgia have kept her down in the past
2025 isn’t the first year Jenelle Evans’ medical needs have taken center stage. In 2024, just after moving to Las Vegas, Evans suffered a knee injury. She spent weeks telling her social media followers that her leg pain, after falling down stairs, was so intense that she was using a wheelchair. She eventually updated fans that she had transitioned to a walker, finally able to bear weight on her leg. There was no lasting damage, though she did claim her ACL was “stretched” but not torn.
Before 2024, she battled a host of other medical issues, some mysterious, some not. In 2023, she had a procedure on her esophagus after dealing with spasms for several years. Evans has claimed that esophageal spasms have impacted her life since at least 2020. In an Instagram update covered by People, she claimed that several other medical issues were discovered during treatment. She wrote, “#HealthUpdate Found out I have thymic hyperplasia and lesions on my liver, and no, I don’t have MG like they thought.” MG likely refers to Myasthenia Gravis, an autoimmune disease. She never updated her followers with an official diagnosis after all the testing.
In 2022, she said she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. In several interviews, she asserted that she couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t in pain. 2019 also brought medical trouble for Jenelle Evans. That year, she had surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. One ovary was removed during that surgery. She had been hospitalized previously for ruptured cysts. There have been other medical troubles along the way, too.
