Vicki Gunvalson is opening up about a harrowing near-death experience.
Even though Vicki Gunvalson is not one of the titular Housewives on The Real Housewives of Orange County Season 18, she will always be the OG of the OC.
As she tells it, people mistook her alarming symptoms for a stroke. Then, doctors misdiagnosed her with a sinus infection.
Ultimately, she received a diagnosis and treatment. This could so easily have been the end of her life.
What near-death experience did Vicki Gunvalson survive?
As you can see in the video below, Vicki Gunvalson sat down for the Monday, August 26 episode of her My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast podcast.
According to Vicki, she received a diagnosis in early August. Doctors determined that she had a sinus infection.
Before she headed off for a family vacation in Europe, she explained, doctors prescribed her antibiotics. Unfortunately, that was not the end of it.
When Vicki Gunvalson returned home from her European getaway, she suffered various alarming symptoms.
She began losing time — not minutes, but “an hour or two.” At one point, she went from the hair salon to her office with no memory of the intervening time.
People at work told her that she had been “talking gibberish.” This also extended to writing, as she apparently sent an email that “didn’t make sense” to the recipient.
Vicki Gunvalson’s symptoms were alarming; was she having a stroke?
Everyone can garble a sentence, a paragraph, or more. Anyone can find themselves “briefly” lost in thought only to find that it’s 15 minutes later. But these are not ordinary moments — they were red flags for a health emergency.
One of Vicki Gunvalson’s clients warned her that she might be having a stroke. Strokes can manifest with various symptoms, and unintelligible speech is perhaps the most recognizable of them all.
The hospital allegedly “misdiagnosed” her with a sinus infection and sent her home. Unfortunately, this is not the end of her horror story.
At home, Vicki Gunvalson’s boyfriend, Michael Smith, later found her in the bathtub at home. (Thankfully, she’s done with Steve Lodge forever) Michael spoke about this on the podcast.
“One of the scariest things for me was when I walked in, for some reason, Vicki decided she wanted to take a bath,” he expressed.
Michael recalled: “So she’s in the bathtub with water, and I walk in, and she’s pretty much passed out.”
What was the actual diagnosis?
14 hours later, Michael sought medical assistance for his girlfriend. This time, doctors found the apparent actual cause of her near-death experience.
“She had a massive infection… it was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia,” Michael described on the podcast.
He added: “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.”
“My right lung is pretty compacted with junk,” Vicki Gunvalson shared. She also admitted that she has very little energy, despite her release from the hospital.
Though Vicki Gunvalson has latched onto unhinged antivaxx conspiracy theories in the past, it’s good to see that she was willing to accept medical help when she needed it.
We hope that she will soon make a complete recovery. Vicki Gunvalson deserves to be able to put this near-death experience behind her.