RHOC's Vicki Gunvalson Nearly Died After Being Misdiagnosed With Sinus Infection! This Is SO Terrifying!

We’re so glad Vicki Gunvalson is OK after this horrifying health scare!

On Monday’s very special episode of My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast, Vicki opened up about a recent health issue she had. It was so bad, the Real Housewives of Orange County star had to bring along her beau Michael Smith to explain the parts she forgot due to “amnesia”. OMG!

She revealed it all started earlier this month when she had a routine hair appointment. She said everything was going “as usual” until she started to have gaps in her memory:

“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.”

The client she’d been communicating with was a “retired ER physician” and feared the worst — that Vicki might’ve been having a stroke! He reached out to Michael’s daughter Olivia and told her about the situation:

“He got up and told Olivia that I was possibly having a stroke, we didn’t know. I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital.”

So scary! The Bravolebrity admitted she doesn’t “recall much” about that night, but she was discharged after she was diagnosed with a sinus infection. Sadly, this was only the beginning for her medical issues…

Michael said Vicki did have a sinus infection a few weeks prior, but it felt “different” than the ones she’d had before:

“It lasted a little longer and she was really not feeling that well.”

But that didn’t slow them down at the time. She took her antibiotics and “was doing better” so they went on their vacay to Europe. Michael said things were “OK, for the most part” during their trip, but when they got back to the states, everything started to go awry. When Olivia had to take Vicki to the ER, she called her dad to come home. He recalled:

“[Vicki] was lethargic and she really didn’t understand where she was.”

Doctors were dismissive of the whole thing, satisfied with the sinus infection diagnosis since she’d had one recently. When Michael got home, though, something happened that he described as “one of the scariest” moments of her whole health scare:

“I walk in and she’s pretty much passed out [in the 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.”

When Vicki finally woke up, however, things did NOT get better. She was “disoriented”, so Michael brought her back to the ER. Doctors took her more seriously this go-around, and quickly got her into an exam room where they realized they’d misdiagnosed her with a sinus infection before — things were MUCH more serious than anyone realized.

The 62-year-old’s boyfriend explained:

“She had a massive infection. 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.”

SEPSIS?!? OMG!

Michael said he’s been sticking by his lady’s side until she starts feeling like herself again:

“It was dangerous. I mean, I’m just trying not to play into it, but it was scary.”

Vicki’s recovery has been “a long process” and she’s tried “everything under the sun” to help her get better. In fact, she said Michael and Olivia are her “guardian angels” — because she “would have probably died” had she been home alone. She’s got some major amnesia surrounding the entire ordeal, too:

“I don’t remember much, and that’s the trauma of the brain. 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.”

Her trauma is completely understandable, too. She recalled she had a conversation with a neurologist who revealed she only stood a “10 to 20 percent” chance of surviving the infection:

“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?’ 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.’”

We’re so glad she made a recovery! We can’t imagine how stomach-churning that was to hear…

Vicki admitted it’s taken a toll on her mentally:

“I cry a lot. And Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ I don’t have an answer. 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].”

So sad. But she’s making sure everyone knows she’s okay now. Michael told listeners: