RHOC star Vicki Gunvalson details a “deadly” health scare she endured and reveals she had a “10 to 20 percent” chance of survival.
The OG of the OC is opening up about a serious health scare.
On the August 26 episode of Vicki Gunvalson’s My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast, the Real Housewives of Orange County OG detailed a recent health crisis she endured that resulted in amnesia.
She was joined by her boyfriend, Micheal Smith, who filled 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.
Vicki Gunvalson explains that earlier this month, she recalled going to the hair salon “as usual.”
“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.
Said client was a “retired ER physician” who noticed something was off with the RHOC star.
“He got up and told [Michael’s daughter] Olivia that I was possibly having a stroke, we didn’t know,” she continued. “I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital.”
According to Vicki, she doesn’t “recall much” of what happened afterward but was discharged from the hospital after being misdiagnosed with a sinus infection.
Vicki Gunvalson’s boyfriend explained that her sinus infection the week prior felt “different” than usual.
“It lasted a little longer, and she was really not feeling that well,” he said before noting that she took antibiotics and “was doing better” before leaving on a trip to Europe.
“Everything was OK, for the most part,” Smith continued, explaining that he was in Arizona when Vicki’s medical episode occurred. His daughter called him to come home.
“She was lethargic and she really didn’t understand where she was,” he said.
When Smith returned home, he found Vicki taking a bath.
“I walk in and she’s pretty much passed out,” he recalled, calling it “one of the scariest” moments of the entire 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.”
When Vicki Gunvalson woke up, she was disoriented, which worried Smith, who thought she may have had a stroke, so he brought her to the hospital.
“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.”
“It was dangerous,” he said. “I mean, I’m just trying not the play into it, but it was scary.”
“I don’t remember much, and that’s the trauma of the brain,” the RHOC star 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.”
“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.’”
Vicki went on to admit that the trauma from her health scare has taken a toll on her.
“I cry a lot. And Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ I don’t have an answer,” she said. “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].”
“She will be fine,” Smith said of Vicki. “She’s coming out of it.”
The Real Housewives of Orange County airs on Bravo Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET.
