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Vicki Gunvalson put Tamra Judge on blast after she told their castmates about her health on the latest episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County.
As Tamra, 59, insisted that Vicki, 64, was “normal” and “fine,” despite thinking she had brain damage, Vicki called her out for exposing the results of a doctor’s visit, opened up about her eight brain surgeries, and admitted to experiencing tons of health challenges over the past several decades of her life.
“It was just too bad that she was there when the results were read to me,” Vicki noted on the October 1 episode of the RHOC: After Show.
Meanwhile, Tamra recalled the doctor telling Vicki she had white spots on her brain.
“The doctor said, ‘Yeah, you have, like, white spots on your brain, but that’s normal,’” she shared. “I go, ‘Oh, I have them, too,’ and she took it as she had brain damage. So I went to dinner that night [with Emily Simpson and Jennifer Pedranti], and I said, ‘Well, the doctor, she thinks she has brain damage.’”
As Vicki labeled Tamra “tell-a-Tamra” and accused her of “[telling] everybody” her business, Tamra suggested that Emily and Jennifer took the information and ran with it.
Either way, Vicki felt that Tamra shouldn’t have spilled the beans.
“Tamra knows a lot about my history. It wasn’t Tamra’s place to talk about my health … She misspoke, and she likes gossip. It was wrong,” she declared. “I don’t appreciate Tamra specifically going around talking about brain lesions when she doesn’t have a clue what it was. I had white dots on the scan that were benign. They weren’t anything so that really put me in a bad spot with her because I thought, because I thought, what is your benefit to doing this? Is it to be the gossip queen? It was 100 percent wrong.”
Reflecting on her health history, Vicki confirmed, “I’ve had eight brain surgeries.”
“I’m not a worrier, but I know my health, and when I had sepsis two years ago and was unconscious for 10 days and had a 5 percent chance of survival, yeah, that worried me after I woke up,” she explained. “Like, ‘Oh God, is this the end of my road? The end of my life?”
According to Vicki, she has a cholesteatoma that grows inside her ear, had a mastoid cavity taken out, and also has a cochlear implant and a cadaver eardrum.
“I go every three to four months and get the cholesteatoma sucked out of my cavity. That’s just a big hole in my [head] because they created that on purpose so I didn’t have to have my head cut open every three years,” she revealed. “So now they can go in every three months and suck out the tumors and cholesteatoma that are growing.”
“I’ve had it all,” she went on. “I’ve had all my lymph nodes removed out of my neck. I’ve had more surgeries than I can count. So am I a worrier? I just want to be healthy.”
Vicki later revealed that she had a large tumor that broke through her brain wall at age 34.
“I had a 36-hour surgery … and they came out and told my mom and dad they didn’t think I’d ever be able to use my mouth, maybe I was gonna become blind on this side, and the first thing I remember was waking up after surgery, and they said, ‘Please move your mouth, please move your mouth,’ and I could,” she said. “I was in a huge sling; my head was in a big stand because I was leaking spinal fluid for a long time, so that went into spinal meningitis. I mean, I’ve had it all.”
During another moment, after Heather Dubrow, 57, said she’d “tried to connect [Vicki] with a neurologist,” Tamra insisted, “She’s fine.”
“That’s why we never heard about it again,” Heather replied.
The Real Housewives of Orange County season 20 airs Thursdays at 8/7c on Bravo.