The 62-year-old Bravo star revealed during a recent episode of her podcast My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast that she was rushed to the hospital earlier this month after she suddenly developed amnesia among other concerning symptoms.
“There seems to be about an hour or two that I was missing and I don’t know where I was,” she recalled. “I got to the office. Olivia is [my boyfriend] Michael’s [Smith] daughter who works with me. 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.”
Gunvalson’s client, who was a retired ER physician, thought she may be having a stroke, so Smith’s daughter rushed her to the hospital where she was then “misdiagnosed” with a sinus infection and given antibiotics.
But her health took a turn for the worse when she returned home and her boyfriend found her unconscious in the bathtub.
Smith, who appeared on the podcast, said finding Gunvalson in that state was “one of the scariest” experiences.
“For some reason, Vicki decided she wanted to take a bath. So she’s in the bathtub with water and I walk in and she’s pretty much passed out,” he recalled. “So I grabbed her, that was scary, and I grabbed her, pulled her out of the water, put her in bed.” He added that Gunvalson slept for almost 14 hours and “didn’t know where she was” when he tried to wake her up.
Photo: Charles Sykes/Bravo
Gunvalson was then rushed to the hospital where she was diagnosed with pneumonia, a condition she says she is still struggling with to this day.
“She had a massive infection… it was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia,” Smith said. “The way 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.”
She recalled a conversation she had with physician at the hospital who told her that her chances of survival had been quite low in the beginning. “I said, did I hear this right that I had a 10 to 20 percent [chance of] survival?” she said. The physician replied, “‘Yes, the sepsis that went to your body is deadly and you survived it. And so you’re going to be okay. It’s just going to take a while.'”
Though she admits that she is still struggling to recover her energy since her bout in the hospital, she appears grateful to be on the other side of the saga.
“I really believe I had guardian angels with me with Olivia and Michael and my friend Tina was there and just getting me care,” she said. “I couldn’t do it myself. So I think I have a little bit of trauma from it. I cry a lot and Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ And I don’t have an answer.”
Gunvalson became emotional on the podcast as she recalled that they had been on a trip to European just days before she landed in the hospital. “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 said.
However, it looks like the RHOC OG is on the mend. “She will be fine,” Smith said of his partner. “She’s coming out of it.”
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