Vicki Gunvalson got emotional while reflecting on a recent health scare with potentially “deadly” consequences.
The Real Housewives of Orange County star, 62, opened up about the medical incident during the Monday, August 26, episode of “My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast,” bringing along her boyfriend, Michael Smith, to fill in some of the gaps in her story.
“There’s a lot of hours missing in my life because I got, like, amnesia,” she explained.
Gunvalson went on to recall going to the hair salon “as usual” earlier this month. “There seems to be about an hour or two that I was missing and I don’t know where I was. So I got to the office … I had a client coming in and she said I was talking gibberish and I wrote an email out and the email didn’t make sense,” she said.
The client was a “retired ER physician” who noticed something was off. “He got up and told [Michael’s daughter] Olivia that I was possibly having a stroke, we didn’t know,” Gunvalson continued. “I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital.”
Gunvalson confessed that she doesn’t “recall much” of what happened afterward. She said she was misdiagnosed with a sinus infection before being discharged that night.
Smith noted that Gunvalson did have a sinus infection a few weeks prior that felt “different” than usual. “It lasted a little longer and she was really not feeling that well,” he said.
The reality star took antibiotics and “was doing better” before heading on a trip to Europe. “Everything was OK, for the most part,” Smith continued.
Smith was in Arizona when Gunvalson’s medical episode occurred, and his daughter called him to come home. “She was lethargic and she really didn’t understand where she was,” he said, noting that the doctors “kind of ran with” the sinus infection diagnosis after being told Gunvalson had recently gotten over one.
When Smith returned home, Gunvalson was taking a bubble bath. “I walk in and she’s pretty much passed out,” he recalled, describing “one of the scariest” moments of the whole ordeal. “I grabbed her, pulled her out of the water, put her in bed. The doctor said she just needed to sleep, so I put her in bed and she slept literally 13, 14 hour straight.”
Gunvalson was disoriented when she woke up, leading Smith to worry she may have had a stroke. He brought her to the hospital, where she was quickly put into an exam room.
“She had a massive infection,” Smith said. “It was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia. And what happened — and I’m no doctor, but when they explained it — is that when your body is fighting that big of an infection and that dangerous of an infection, your whole body attacks it, which affects the brain and everything else in your body because your body sends everything it has to fight it.”
Recovering has been “a long process,” and Gunvalson has taken “everything under the sun” to get better. Smith noted that he was staying with Gunvalson until she’s back to feeling like herself.
“It was dangerous,” he said. “I mean, I’m just trying not the play into it, but it was scary.”
Gunvalson thanked her “guardian angels,” including Olivia, saying that she “would have probably died” if she had been home alone.
“I don’t remember much, and that’s the trauma of the brain,” she said. “It’s very similar to a stroke or PTSD where the brain kind of just goes into quiet mode. … There was just a litany of things that could have happened and gone wrong and it didn’t.”
Gunvalson was overcome with emotion as she reflected on a conversation she had with a neurologist. “I wanted to be sure I was understanding everything correctly. … I said, ‘Did I hear this right, that I had a 10 to 20 percent [chance of] survival?’” she said. “And the lady said on the phone — she’s been calling me every day — she said, ‘Yes, the sepsis that went to your body is deadly and you survived it.’”
The “trauma” from the experience has taken a toll. “I cry a lot. And Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ I don’t have an answer,” she said while getting choked up. “I mean, rewind a week ago, we were in Barcelona walking 16 [to] 20,000 steps and we were having the time of our life. And three days later, [I’m in the hospital].”
Smith assured fans that Gunvalson is “doing better” thanks to her friends and loved ones. “She will be fine,” he said. “She’s coming out of it.”