Teddi Mellencamp is sharing her personal experience with COVID amid all of the conflicting misinformation surrounding the delta variant and vaccinations.
via People:
On Monday’s episode of Teddi Tea Pod, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hillsalum told her podcast listeners that she and her husband Edwin Arroyave had both recently tested positive for COVID-19.
Mellencamp, 40, said that since recovering she has still been experiencing vertigo, which she said was a symptom of her COVID-19. While Mellencamp was vaccinated against the virus, Arroyave, 44, was not, she said, and had more severe symptoms.
“A while back I had COVID and I didn’t really talk about it because I was just really focused on making sure that I was healthy and my family was healthy,” Mellencamp said on the podcast. “I was vaccinated and my husband was not, which he has since realized what a big mistake that was.”
Mellencamp said that she and her husband “both had COVID and we had to quarantine from our family, and actually from each other.”
“At first, he tested positive so he was quarantined,” she said. “Then I had a feeling so I just quarantined myself as well into another room until I ended up testing positive.”
Mellencamp said that she and Arroyave had “very different” experiences with COVID-19.
“I got through it quicker,” she said, explaining that she was sick for about six days while Arroyave was sick for about 15 days.
“Edwin, he was super weak, and it was so many different things and it really was a great reminder how important it is, you know, to get vaccinated,” she added.
Breakthrough cases — COVID-19 infections that occur in people who have been fully vaccinated against the virus — are rare, but possible and expected, as the vaccines are not 100 percent effective in preventing infections. Still, vaccinated people who test positive will likely be asymptomatic or experience a far milder illness than if they were not vaccinated. The majority of deaths from COVID-19 — around 98 to 99 percent — are in unvaccinated people.
Mellencamp, who shares kids Slate, 8, Cruz, 6, and Dove, 1, with Arroyave, said it was “extremely difficult” not to be around her kids while quarantining and that she was constantly “worried of giving it to them, especially because Slate has an autoimmune disease.”
One of her most prominent symptoms, she said, was vertigo — a feeling of dizziness, a false sense of motion, and imbalance.
“I would feel like I was laying on a water bed and then when I’d get up I’d feel dizzy,” she said. “And it kind of lingered with me, even post-COVID, and it had been continuing to happen.”
Mellencamp said that her active lifestyle has had to “shift” because of the “lingering dizzy feeling” she was getting.
The former reality star said that she hadn’t yet seen a doctor for vertigo because it has been milder since she had COVID-19, but an incident over the weekend prompted her to seek medical care.
She fell Saturday night during a bout of vertigo, and fainted when she tried to pull herself back up. The fall caused her to bust her lip and resulted in a black eye.
Recounting the story on Instagram Sunday, Mellencamp called the incident “scary” and said she has “felt really foggy and just not like myself ever since.” She added that she will “be diligent about wanting to understand why it happened.”
Get vaccinated, love muffins.
