We’re shook! Actress Francia Raisa gave best pal Selena Gomez, 25, a life saving kidney, but is now revealing that the singer suffered a post-transplant complication that nearly killed her! In a new interview with W Magazine, the 29-year-old says that after she gave her kidney to her pal, the organ didn’t initially take well. The grownish star says that while “recovery was hard,” for her, it was nearly fatal for the “Wolves” singer. “Selena did have a complication, too. A few hours after our surgery, I woke up and had a text from her that said, ‘I’m really scared.’ My kidney was very active, and when it turned I broke an artery. They had to take her into emergency surgery and get a vein from her leg and build a new artery to keep my kidney in place. She could have died,” the actress told the publication. Oh..my…god!!! That sounds terrifying.
Selena already was so scared when she got the prognosis that she needed a new kidney and would likely die without one. Francia reveals that she saw her roommate’s health deteriorate as she battled the autoimmune disease Lupus. Sel ended up developing arthritis and after a doctor’s trip got the dire diagnosis. “She went to go get tests, and she came home one day and she was serious,” Francia said. “We all have our moments, so I just let her do her thing, I didn’t ask questions.”
“She was asking me about my day and she grabbed a water bottle out of the fridge and tried to open it and couldn’t. Then she threw it on the floor, and she fell to the floor and started crying. I was like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ She said, ‘I need a new kidney. I don’t know what I’m going to do, the waitlist is seven to 10 years.’ And it just came out of me, and I said, ‘I’ll get tested.’ I called her assistant behind her back to get the information, and that’s how the process started,” Francia continued.
Thank goodness that her best friend turned out to be a match, and they underwent the three-hour transplant procedure over the summer. Even after the surgery, they weren’t out of the woods and it led to depression for both ladies. “We didn’t want to tell anybody because recovery was very hard for us, and we went through a depression at the time,” Francia revealed. “We kind of just wanted to be normal and not have that attention on us. I really left it up to her. I’ve never had anything personal come out about me before. I’ve dated very famous people, and no one knows because I’m very private. I was like, ‘Did you have to be famous?’”
Selena ended up spilling the news to fans in a Sept. 2017 Instagram post that she received a new kidney from her BFF and the two did a joint interview on the Today Show about it the following month. When Savannah Guthrie, 46, asked Sel if she felt that Francia saved her life, she was very blunt with her answer. “She did. That’s it. I guess I got to the point where it was really kind of life or death.”