Vicki Gunvalson Suffered a “Deadly” Health Scare Caused by a Massive Infection

The Real Housewives of Orange County's Vicki Gunvalson is lucky to be alive after a recent health scare.

Vicki detailed the incident on the August 26 episode of My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast with help from her boyfriend, Michael Smith, as she couldn't remember everything that happened. As she put it, "There's a lot of hours missing."

What Vicki does remember is that on the day of the scare, she went and got her hair done before going into the office. After that, "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," Vicki continued. "So I went in with the client and my client happened to be a retired ER Physician, and he got up and told [Michael’s daughter] Olivia that I was possibly having a stroke. I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital."'

Once there, Vicki said she was "misdiagnosed" as having a sinus infection. Michael, however, noted that three weeks prior, she did have a sinus infection that "lasted a little longer" than normal. "She got on antibiotics and was doing better, we went to Europe, and everything was OK, for the most part," Michael explained. "But then when she got home on that Thursday night and Olivia called me, she was lethargic and really didn't understand where she was." 

Michael had been in Arizona for work, but took the first flight out once he got the news about Vicki. "When I got here, her friend was with her and she left, but three minutes before I was walking in the door ... for some reason, Vicki decided she wanted to take a bath," Michael recalled. "So, she's in the bathtub with water and I walk in and she's pretty much passed out. I grabbed her, pulled her out of the water, put her in bed." 

Vicki subsequently went to sleep for about 14 hours, but was still disoriented when she woke up. As Michael put it, "She was so discombobulated [during] this whole thing, I was afraid she was having a stroke." 

So, the pair headed back to the hospital. "She had a massive infection," Michael revealed. "It was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia and what happened … 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, which affects the brain and everything else in your body because your body sends everything it has to fight it."

The whole experience was "pretty emotional," he added. "It was dangerous. I was trying not to play into it, but it was scary." 

Vicki Gunvalson posts a photo of herself and her boyfriend, Michael Smith, to her instagram account on November 27th, 2022. Photo: Vicki Gunvalson/Instagram

After all, according to Vicki, she only had "a 10 to 20 percent" chance of survival. "The lady said on the phone, 'The sepsis that went through your body is deadly and you survived it. So, you're gonna be okay, it's just gonna take you a while.'"

"I think I have a little bit of trauma from it," Vicki said upon further reflection. "I cry a lot, and Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ and I don’t have an answer."

Vicki's still recovering today, but Michael assured listeners, "She's doing better. She will be fine. She’s coming out of it.”