SELLING SUNSET'S AMANZA SMITH - 'I Was Two Days From Dying'

A LIFE-THREATENING BONE INFECTION LEFT HER HOSPITALIZED FOR A MONTH. NOW THE REALITY SHOW STAR OPENS UP ABOUT HER SPINAL SURGERIES AND THE HARD ROAD TO RECOVERY

- JP MANGALINDAN

Amanza Smith was at home in Los Angeles in May suffering from a severe backache that had lasted nearly a month when she awoke at 2 a.m. Crippled by pain, she had to crouch over and brace herself on her knees to reach the bathroom. When she tried to return to her bed, she coltapsed: "I couldn't get up: I couldn't move. I thought, ‘I don’t know what this is, but it hurts so bad.’ ”

Smith, 46, an interior designer who stars on Netflix’s glamorous real estate reality show Selling Sunset, lay there for 20 minutes, too far from a phone to call for help and fearful that her children might wake and find her. Finally she inched her way into the living room on her stomach, turning and rolling on the floor. “I remember being terrified for the first time in my life.”

After five more days in agony and unable to walk (“It felt like my back was gone at the bottom, and I couldn’t hold myself up”), Smith agreed to let a friend take her to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. An MRI revealed she had osteomyelitis, a rare and potentially life-threatening bone infection that was attacking her lower vertebrae. In an estimated two out of 10 patients with vertebral osteomyelitis, the infection is fatal—and in Smith’s case, it was dangerously advanced. “One or two more days at home, and you could have been dead,” her doctor told her later. The message was sobering: “I thought I had a backache, and I almost died,” she says. “The doctors and my friend saved my life.”