Featured Image Credit: Twitter/@BrandiGlanville
Topics: Health, Celebrity, Mental Health, US News
Liv Bridge
Topics: Health, Celebrity, Mental Health, US News
Brandi Glanville is convinced a 'parasite' is living in her face and has revealed she believes she contracted it while abroad.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star has been through quite a traumatic ordeal for the past two years.
Glanville revealed last year that she had sought specialist medical advice countless times to try and get a diagnosis for her sudden and mysterious facial disfigurement that has left her looking completely different.
By the end of last year, the former model said she had lost nearly half a dozen teeth and felt like a shell of her former self, telling Page Six on the Virtual Reali-Tea podcast that it has had a tremendous toll on her mental health and social life, often 'hiding out' from parties and the festive season.
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"It’s depressing. It just hurts my brain and my heart,” she said. “The pain is more mental than anything, because I have been hiding and going through a deep, deep depression."
Initially, it was believed the celeb suffered a 'stress-induced angioedema', however, another prevailing theory is that she has contracted a 'parasite' that's been living, and apparently thriving, under her skin.
The 52-year-old traced the problem back to when she was filming the Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip in Morocco, North Africa, stating at the time she could 'feel' something move around under her skin.
"We had food sitting out for hours on end, and some of it was meat," she told Entertainment Tonight last year.
Then six months after her trip, in July 2023, she said her face started to 'swell', 'sink in' and the surface of her skin looked like 'tiny bubbles bursting.'
To add insult to injury, medics are yet to come up with a formal diagnosis - and the Californian star says she's forked out more than $70,000, including $10,000 on lab work, in the her battle to weed the problem out.
She's convinced a parasite has moved in, saying she can feel it 'jumping' around, 'having babies' and even 's***ing' under the surface of her skin.
"I have chills and a constant oily foul tasting drainage from face into mouth. It's acidic and is eating away at my teeth,” she shared in a post on Twitter. “Plus all of my lymph nodes in head and neck are swollen. Drs at Kaiser say I'm fine. HELP ME.”
The mom-of-two has also been candidly sharing many of the 'hacks' she's picked up to try to win the war against whatever could be causing her issues - from using a lymphatic drainage machine to applying Nair, a hair removal cream, on her face as well as a concoction of aloe vera, cucumber and black tea.
Glanville said about her 'beauty hack': "Good news, you guys don’t have to spend a lot of money on pills and lasers anymore, because I decided to put Nair on my face.
“Because when I have an exfoliated face it p*sses the [parasite] off, whoever is living in my face.”
However, fans were left concerned by the result, commenting that it appeared she had suffered a chemical burn from the array of products she had piled on and urged her to look into a rare and relatively unknown condition called Morgellons disease.
The disease is a form of delusional parasitosis, where a person believes they are infested with a parasite despite physical examinations by health experts not finding evidence of it.
Dr Dubrow also told TMZ last year that he believes her disfigurement comes from an 'infectious process or a foreign body reaction to something she's had injected' as opposed to a parasite, but said her condition is nonetheless a 'ticking time bomb.'
"There are these two kinds of microorganisms, one's called a Microbacterium and the other is called a fungus, and they can be very difficult to treat and could take six to 12 months of antibiotics to treat," he said.
"Every minute the microorganism is allowed to stay in her skin and do potential damage she could suffer worse for it," he continued. "It could be more difficult to treat and she could form more scars and more nodules."