‘The doctors and my friend saved my life’: ‘Selling Sunset’ star Amanza Smith reveals she ‘almost died’ following health scare

Amanza Smith is opening up about a scary near-fatal spine infection that led to a month-long hospitalization and shared that it’s given her a new perspective on life.

The Selling Sunset star told People she’d been suffering from a serious backache for nearly a month, which eventually caused her to collapse at her home in late May 2023. Afterward, her close friend convinced her to go to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she underwent an MRI and was diagnosed with vertebral osteomyelitis. Doctors told Smith that it was really advanced in her case and if she’d spent “one or two more days at home, and you could have been dead.”

“I thought I had a backache, and I almost died,” she told the publication. “The doctors and my friend saved my life.” Vertebral osteomyelitis is a spinal infection that can develop from “direct open spinal trauma, infections in surrounding areas and from bacteria that spreads to a vertebra from the blood,” according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. It is fatal in an estimated 20% of cases.

Smith had surgery on her lower spine to clear out the infection, but doctors found that it had also spread to another part of her spine. That area was a riskier place to operate, she shared, because it was close to her kidney and her aorta. They tried antibiotics, but it didn’t stop the infection. “The risk was the antibiotics wouldn’t penetrate the bone, and my entire back could collapse,” Smith explained, so she underwent a second surgery. That one was a six-hour surgery during which doctors put a titanium mesh cage in her back with rods and screws to support her spine.

Smith, who was discharged on July 3, now faces a lengthy recovery over several months, involving antibiotics and physical therapy. “I will never take my mobility for granted again,” she shared. “When I can walk and jog again and do Pilates or ballet, I hope I stick to them because I plan on living to be 107.” The Selling Sunset star, who is a mother to two children, said the experience was like a “rebirth.”

It wasn’t all negative this summer for Smith, though, as she debuted her new boyfriend on Instagram on Aug. 1 and praised him for supporting her through her health struggles. “When I needed you most there you were. Love really shows up when you least expect it so grateful for this man!” she wrote on Instagram alongside a video of her and her mystery man sharing a kiss.