The 29-year-old actress, who donated her kidney to Gomez last year, revealed that her friend faced a life-threatening health scare 'hours after our surgery.'
Selena Gomez is in great health following her kidney transplant operation last year, but it turns out the singer faced a potentially fatal health scare during her recovery.
Francia Raisa, Gomez's friend and kidney donor, opened up to W Magazine about the difficult time they both endured while recuperating, including a serious "complication" that Gomez faced immediately after the procedure.
"A few hours after our surgery, I woke up and had a text from her that said, 'I'm really scared,'" the 29-year-old Grown-ish actress revealed. "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."
Raisa added, "She could have died."
However, the recovery process wasn't much easier for Raísa, who struggled with intense pain for months following the surgery.
"It’s harder as the donor, because we are losing something our body didn’t need to lose, so trying to recover from that -- and she’s gaining something her body needed,” Raisa told Harry Connick Jr. during an episode of his daytime talk show, Harry, back in February.
“I basically have four scars," she added. "It was laparoscopic. Those mothers out there who had C-sections, I feel you. I don’t know how you take care of a child afterwards. It is crazy. I couldn’t get up without having someone help me. That was very humbling. I couldn’t take a shower by myself. I had to have someone help me because I couldn’t move."
It was also very difficult to have to sit still for weeks after the surgery. Raisa describes herself as a "very active person" but her doctor she "couldn’t move for two months."
"I couldn't do anything active... I have a dog, and every day, the thing I look forward to is drinking my coffee and walking, and I couldn’t do that," she added. "It was really, really hard."
Raisa donated her kidney to Gomez after the "Wolves" singer, who has spent years battling arthritis and the autoimmune disease lupus, began to get increasingly ill as her kidneys started to shut down.
"My kidneys were just done," Gomez said in an interview with the Today show in October. "That was it, and I didn’t want to ask a single person in my life… and [Raisa] volunteered and did it."
“She did [save my life],” she added. "As soon as I got the kidney, my arthritis went away. My lupus is at a three-to-five percent chance it'll ever come back. My blood pressure is better. My energy and my life has been better."
For more on Raisa and Gomez's kidney transplant, check out the video below.
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