Vicki Gunvalson detailed the “deadly” health crisis she experienced earlier this month that caused her to have “a lot of hours missing” in her life.
The “Real Housewives of Orange County” star recalled on Monday’s episode of “My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast” that she developed amnesia seemingly out of nowhere.
“There seems to be about an hour or two that I was missing and I don’t know where I was,” she shared, explaining that she began “talking gibberish” to a client that was coming into her office.
The client in question happened to be a retired doctor who urged her beau Michael Smith’s daughter Olivia that the Bravolebrity could be “having a stroke.”
“I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital,” she recalled.
Gunvalson, 62, said physicians ultimately misdiagnosed with a sinus infection and discharged from the hospital later that night. She took antibiotics, but Olivia insisted on calling her father to come home and care for the reality star.
“She was lethargic and she really didn’t understand where she was,” Michael said on the podcast, noting that the doctors “kind of ran with” the sinus infection diagnosis after being told Gunvalson recently recovered from one.
Michael called doctors after describing “one of the scariest” moments of her health crisis in which he found her “pretty much passed out” in a bubble bath.
“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 hours straight,” he recalled, adding that he ultimately took her to the hospital again after she woke up disoriented.
“She had a massive infection. It was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia,” Michael revealed, “and what happened … 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.”
The Coto Insurance founder grew emotional as she recalled a neurologist telling her she had a “10 to 20 percent [chance of survival].”
“I cry a lot, and Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ I don’t have an answer,” she said as she held back tears. “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].”
Michael assured fans that Gunvalson’s health is improving.
“She will be fine,” he said. “She’s coming out of it.”
