Real Housewives of Orange County star Vicki Gunvalson reveals health scare as doctors told her she had 20% chance to live

The 62-year-old TV star spoke about her experience during an episode of the ‘My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast’ show, in which she said that doctors “misdiagnosed” a possibly fatal condition as a sinus infection. Gunvalson was rushed to hospital after experiencing amnesia and stroke-like symptoms, with doctors treating her for a sinus infection and discharging her.

It wasn’t until her boyfriend, Michael Smith, came home and found the RHOC star unconscious in a bathtub and rushed to the hospital once again that Gunvalson was given the true diagnosis. Doctors determined during her second visit that she had actually had sepsis and pneumonia, and gave her a “10 to 20 per cent chance of survival”.

Speaking about her symptoms, Gunvalson said that she experience gaps of memory loss including “an hour or two that I was missing and I don’t know where I was.” She added that the last thing she remembered before her second hospital trip was being discharged by doctors earlier that same night.

Gunvalson, who visited the hair salon before heading into her office earlier in the day, said that a client who visited her who was a trained ER physician spotted symptoms of a stroke, after she was “talking gibberish” wrote an email that “didn’t make sense”.

Smith told the podcast: “She had a massive infection... it was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia. 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.”

Gunvalson was kept in for several days and received multiple doses of steroids and antibiotics. She has since been resting at home, but still feels the affects of the illness, telling that podcast she was still “lethargic” and that her right lung is “compacted with junk” due to the pneumonia, adding: "I'm having a hard time getting it [her energy] up. So that's my biggest thing.”