Chicago ? Once she was the first lady of Illinois. Now Patti Blagojevich is gagging down bugs and crawling through tropical slime in a race to be named Queen of the Jungle on a reality TV show.

Impeached Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s wife has survived Week 1 on NBC’s “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” Some say her emergence as the plucky, well-liked mom of the group could help erase the image of the “foul-mouthed Lady MacBeth” who spewed profanity on secretly recorded FBI tapes in her husband’s corruption case.

A tearful Patti Blagojevich introduced herself to viewers by explaining that her family had been going through a hard time. She later told her supportive castmates she and her husband had lost their jobs and she was doing this to support their daughters.

“For the last few months of our lives it’s been pretty difficult, so in some ways — ah, I’m going to cry,” she told an interviewer, looking upward. “After that, the jungle doesn’t seem quite so scary.”

NBC had wanted the former governor on the show, in which viewers vote the quasi-celebrities out of the steaming, bug-ridden jungle camp. The network did get publicity shots of him hoisted in the air by a harness, flapping his arms and legs like a bird.

But U.S. District Judge James B. Zagel, who is presiding over Blagojevich’s corruption case, refused to let him leave the country, so his wife joined the cast instead. She is cited on one FBI tape as urging the firing of newspaper writers unfriendly to her husband, but she has not been charged with wrongdoing.