Locken opens up to ET about her battle with necrosis following her breast revision surgery and how it affected her behavior on the show.
LeeAnne Locken says she’s lucky to be alive.
The Real Housewives of Dallas star underwent a breast augmentation revision last year -- on camera -- and claims she contracted a flesh-eating bacteria during the healing process.
“I’m still not fully recovered,” she tells ET, more than a year after the surgery. “It took three months to actually stop the disease from eating my skin, for the necrosis to stop … It took probably seven months before some of my organs even began to function normally.”
“People don’t realize how incredibly ill I was,” she adds, noting she continued to film the Bravo show while dealing with her condition.
“There were days where I would sleep 18 hours a day,” she recalls. “This disease almost killed me. There were holes in my body. There was a morning where I showered and I could see a blue stitch [from my surgery], and then three hours later, when I was at the doctor, the disease had eaten the entire stitch.”
LeeAnne says some of her behavior on the show this year was a result of how exhausted she was from fighting off the flesh-eating bacteria. On the most recent episode, LeeAnne smashed a wine glass in her co-stars’ faces -- something she now says wouldn’t have happened had she been functioning at 100 percent.
“You know how, when you’re tired, you just don’t have any patience?” she asks. “When you’re sick and tired, there is zero patience. I had zero patience. And when people wouldn’t stay focused, I was like, ‘We gonna focus now.’ But watching it back, I wish that I had not been sick, so that I would’ve had a little more patience and a little more, um… elegance.”
LeeAnne admits behavior like that is still a problem for her, and it’s something she’s working on. When she can think clearly, she says she knows to not be so reactive.
“I finally need to really work on the behavior,” she confesses. “It’s the reaction. It’s the automatic reaction. You know, I haven’t really talked about it, but I have PTSD from everything that I’ve been through, and so a lot of people with that – it’s a reactive state. You react.”
Expect LeeAnne to explain more about her PTSD, stemming from her abusive childhood and a rough young adulthood, on Real Housewives of Dallas’ season two reunion, airing this November.
“I tell people, I'm God's jester,” she shares. “When he needs a real good laugh, he's like, 'Let's do this over here with LeeAnne and see how she handles it.' And then, you know, like a trouper, I handle it. And then, you know, he gets a joke and then he moves on, helping other people.”
The Real Housewives of Dallas airs Mondays at 10 p.m. ET on Bravo, and stick with ETonline for more with LeeAnne coming soon.