Jenny McCarthy Reveals Mystery Illness That Caused ‘Living Hell’ Health Ordeal Last Year

Jenny McCarthy is finally on the mend after mysterious health problems caused her to go through “living hell” over the last year.

Four months after The Masked Singer star revealed that she had been suffering from growths on her eyes and having her teeth fall out, McCarthy, 53, revealed on Tuesday’s episode of Maria Menounos’ Heal Squad podcast that it all stemmed from an “infected root canal” she got years prior.

After the root canal “wasn’t cleaned out all the way,” McCarthy claimed that she developed a jawbone infection with “three of these little toxic pools hiding underneath my wisdom teeth.”

“There was an infection left in there and a bone grafted on top of it, so I went on my merry way with infection brewing in my bone,” she explained, adding that despite multiple oral surgeries, her mouth “just kept getting infected.”

McCarthy’s symptoms also included “awful” insomnia and leg cramps that were so intense that she’d “wake up crying,” as well as “little lesions” on her eyes that “looked like the nastiest whitehead pus-filled eraser top.”

McCarthy said her doctor blamed mycotoxin poisoning for her various symptoms. Ingesting mycotoxins over a period of time can cause long-term illness and can affect mental function and increase the risk of developing asthma and cancer, as per the Cleveland Clinic.

“The reason why you’re having constant infections, your body won’t heal, you’re oozing things, is because you have mold. You have mycotoxin poisoning,” McCarthy said her doctor told her. “Mold releases this toxin in the dust particles, and what happens is most people … with good immune systems can handle it. People with weaker immune systems, people with leaky gut, candida, things I am already fighting [can’t].”

McCarthy said she is antibiotic-resistant, which means that the antibiotics she had been taking were not able to fight off all her infections, but that she is now treating them with a “heavy-duty mold protocol.”

In November, McCarthy spoke out for the first time about her ongoing health issues, telling PEOPLE that she was finally able to chew solid food again after a year of tooth and eye troubles. “People should actually feel a little sorry for me!” she said at the time.