It goes without saying that Brandi Glanville has had a few difficult years. While navigating a disfiguring facial parasite, doctors discovered that her breast implants were also leaking and ruptured, making her already-harrowing health battle potentially even more dangerous.
As a result, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum, 53, was forced to quietly undergo life-saving surgery to remove the implants before they caused more damage.
Before the surgery on Tuesday, February 3, Glanville spoke exclusively with the Daily Enquirer, a newsletter brought to you by the editors of the National Enquirer, about her state of mind ahead of going under the knife. “I’m just scared to death,” she admitted. “It’s something that I could die from if I hadn’t figured it out.”
According to Glanville, her challenging journey started following a trip to Africa, where she filmed the ill-fatedThe Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip in Morocco and contracted the facial parasite. “I kind of put myself in this, like, three-year self-imposed prison and I started to feel like crap, and I didn’t know why,” she explains.
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However, her health battle was getting worse, internally. After countless doctors visits — where, Glanville explains, they failed to connect her breast implants with her mysterious illness that included symptoms of blurred vision, premature aging and stiff muscles, to name a few — and after sharing photos of her facial disfigurement, she found a community of others who had endured the same thing.
“I have this little online village [and] we’re all sharing what works for us, what helps us, and a lot of us have the same exact symptoms,” the Drinking and Tweeting author says. “Most of them are women that I’m speaking to, and what we didn’t realize or even talk about was how many of us had breast implants.”
According to Glanville, the implants that she had — which she got following the birth of son Jake, now 18, in 2007 — are no longer made. “They’re illegal,” the mom of two — who shares Jake and Mason, 22, with ex Eddie Cibrian — explained.
As Glanville’s symptoms began to get worse, she began to look into breast implant illness — but it wasn’t until she noticed a few weeks ago that her right breast appeared smaller than the left that she finally decided to get a sonogram.
The Traitors alum was floored by the results. “The woman [who] did the sonogram was like, ‘Brandi, you need to get those out yesterday,’” she recalled. “She’s like, ‘You have a slow leak in your left [implant] and your right [implant] is completely ruptured, and it’s in all of your lymph nodes under both arms.”
“That’s probably why, whatever’s going on in your face, it can’t drain because your lymph nodes are clogged with silicone,’” she recalled being told.
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With time of the essence, Glanville started researching highly-recommended plastic surgeons, and eventually chose Dr. Ariel Ourian, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who specializes in explants, to do the surgery.
“Our plan is to take them out,” Glanville told the Daily Enquirer ahead of the surgery, noting that a previous lumpectomy under her right breast had created a lot of scar tissue. “[Dr. Ourian] said there’s scar tissue built up and he doesn’t know what he’s going to find in the lymph nodes and how much scraping he’s going to do, so our second plan would be to put another implant in — which I was like, ‘Nope!’ … I’m like, I don’t want silicone in my body at all.”
Glanville hopes the procedure is the first step in putting the pieces of her life back together. “I want to look better again. I want to work again,” she added during her chat with the Daily Enquirer. “I want to have energy again.”
With reporting by Lanae Brody
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