You know that When I’m Gone lyric in which Eminem implores you to wonder, “Have you ever loved someone so much, you’d give an arm for?” Well, Selena Gomez’s best pal Francia Raisa didn’t go quite that far, but she did love her enough to give her a kidney, and they are now our #BestFriendsGoals.
And if that seems like a big deal to us, imagine how Gomez felt! In a clip shared on Friday by the Today Show, she revealed more about the transplant—and got emotional when talking about her friend’s generosity.
“My kidneys were just done. That was it,” Gomez says in the clip. “I didn’t want to ask a single person in my life and that was the day, when I came home, I found out she volunteered and did it.”
When the show’s host asked Gomez if she feels her pal saved her life, the singer gave a resounding yes. “I guess I got to the point where it was really, kind of, life or death,” she reveals. The full interview will air next week.
We first learned about the 25-year-old chanteuse’s transplant when she took to Instagram earlier this year to reveal that she needed one due to health complications related to her lupus, and that fellow actress Raisa stepped in to lend a hand. “I’m very aware some of my fans had noticed I was laying low for part of the summer and questioning why I wasn’t promoting my new music, which I was extremely proud of,” Gomez wrote. “So I found out I needed to get a kidney transplant due to my lupus and was recovering.”
Since going public about her diagnosis, Gomez has been an important advocate for lupus patients. But there really is a lot of confusion about the disease. Lupus Canada defines it as, “a variety of symptoms caused by inflammation in one or more parts of the body.” A chronic immune disease, it can affect entire organs, but it’s not contagious nor related to cancer. Basically, having lupus means your immune system can’t distinguish between intruders and your body’s own tissues, leading it to attack parts of the body that aren’t bad, which causes inflammation and creates these symptoms. And it’s common among younger women; in fact, between the ages of 15 and 45, eight times more women are diagnosed than men.
All in all, thank goodness Gomez had a good team of doctors and a friend like Raisa on her side. You probs know Raisa, 29, from her time playing Adrian Lee in The Secret Life of the American Teenager (#throwback). The L.A. native has known Gomez since 2008, when they met while volunteering at a children’s hospital.
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