In the past few months, we’ve definitely learned about true friendship goals from Francia Raisa and Selena Gomez. The two made headlines when Gomez revealed in September that, in response to her lupus complications, she received a kidney from Raisa last summer. The friends have spilled about their joint recovery process and the initial conversation that led to Raisa’s organ donation, and now Raisa has shared insight into how scary the situation particularly was for Gomez. In a new interview with W magazine, Grown-ish star Raisa spoke about the near-fatal details of her friend’s surgery.
“Recovery was hard,” she told the magazine. “I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to drink anything. Selena did have a complication, too. A few hours after our surgery, I woke up and had a text from her that said, ‘I’m really scared.’ 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. She could have died.”
This isn’t the first time that one of the women has hinted at how risky the kidney donation and transplant could have been. In their October 2017 TODAY interview with anchor Savannah Guthrie, they revealed that Raisa’s decision to donate led to a speedy, “emergency” situation and that she had to write a will before the surgery.
“Did you ever fear for your own health?” –@savannahguthrie
“I had to write a will which was scary.” –@therealfrancia pic.twitter.com/vAzPMnT45d— TODAY (@TODAYshow) October 30, 2017
Speaking to W, Raisa also said that she let Gomez decide when to publicly share news of the surgery. “We didn’t want to tell anybody because recovery was very hard for us, and we went through a depression at the time,” Raísa said. “We kind of just wanted to be normal and not have that attention on us. I really left it up to her. I’ve never had anything personal come out about me before. I’ve dated very famous people, and no one knows because I’m very private.”
Raisa was still trying to recover from surgery when an audition for Grown-ish came into her life. Only two weeks after she donated her kidney, she delivered her audition while “in so much pain.”
Clearly, the scary, often painful struggles that both Raisa and Gomez faced in the aftermath of surgery were totally worth it. I’ll definitely never stop admiring Raisa for the incredible sign of friendship she displayed throughout this process.