'RHOC' Star Vicki Gunvalson Reveals She Nearly 'Died' After Suffering 'Dangerous' Health Scare

Vicki Gunvalson is on the mend after undergoing a traumatic health scare.

During the Monday, August 26, episode of her podcast "My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast," The Real Housewives of Orange County alum, 62, opened up about nearly losing her life after a terrifying medical incident.

Gunvalson, who was accompanied during the chat by her boyfriend, Michael Smith, recalled taking her regular trip to the hair salon earlier this month when she suddenly became mentally disoriented. "There’s a lot of hours missing in my life because I got, like, amnesia," she explained. "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."

Luckily, the client she was meeting with was a medical professional and took swift action. "He got up and told [Smith’s daughter] Olivia that I was possibly having a stroke, we didn’t know,” the Coto insurance broker revealed. "I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital."

Gunvalson's longtime partner kept an eye on her condition as her symptoms progressed into a sinus infection. "It lasted a little longer and she was really not feeling that well," Smith said. "Everything was OK, for the most part."

However, things took a turn for the worse when Smith was out of town. "She was lethargic and she really didn’t understand where she was," he noted of his girlfriend, whom he quickly rushed back to. "I walk in and she’s pretty much passed out. 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 hour straight."

"She had a massive infection,” Smith confirmed. “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. It was dangerous. It was scary.”

Gunvalson credited her man for coming to her rescue because she "would have probably died" if he hadn't come home. "I don’t remember much, and that’s the trauma of the brain,” the Bravo star revealed. “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."

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Now, Gunvalson has nothing but gratitude for life after it nearly slipped away from her. "I wanted to be sure I was understanding everything correctly. … I said, ‘Did I hear this right, that I had a ten to 20 percent [chance of] survival?'” the businesswoman noted. “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.'”