1st Bachelorette Trista Sutter reflects on scary seizure and vows to 'live fully'
The mother of two suffered from a seizure while vacationing in Croatia.
— -- The first "Bachelorette" star, Trista Sutter, who had a seizure while she was vacationing with her family in Croatia, opened up about the scary medical emergency and how she is dealing with the unanswered questions about her health.
"All I remember was feeling very dizzy and nauseous, and the next thing I knew, I was in this dream. The only way I can describe it is was like a white euphoria," Sutter recalled in an interview with "Good Morning America."
Sutter was on a tour with her husband, Ryan Sutter, whom she met on the series in 2003, and their son Maxwell, 9, and daughter, Blakesley, 8, when she seized violently and landed on top of her daughter.
"I heard Blakesley screaming, 'Mommy, Mommy," Ryan recalled. "Trista had fallen onto Blakesley in a sort of convulsive state."
Ryan, a trained EMT, said despite dealing with his share of emergencies, seeing his wife in this position was terrifying.
"I was checking her pulse. She was shaking and stiff. Her eyes were wide open ... rolled back in her head, looking sort of up. She wasn’t breathing. She was turning sort of blue," he explained.
Sutter said that she's worried about how the incident may have affected her daughter.
"She was traumatized, I think she probably still is a bit," Sutter said of Blakesley. "She knows that something is wrong."
Sutter was rushed to a hospital in the eastern European country where she underwent various tests. She told ABC News doctors did not find anything conclusively wrong with her, but warned her not to drive until she consults a neurologist in the U.S.
"It's changing my life, still is, to this day. I mean I got up this morning -- and I thought, 'I need to go to the grocery store' -- and then I'm like, 'Oh I can't drive.' Because God forbid, I have another seizure or event in the car. And I could kill someone, I could kill myself. I could kill my kids," she said. "I have to have a new perspective in order to keep me and my family and everyone around me safe."
Now back home, Sutter said she plans to see a specialist.
'Why me?'
At 44, the former reality show star led a healthy and active lifestyle and said there were no signs of illness that she noticed besides an occasional headache.
"In this type of situation, you usually ask, 'Why me?' But then I thought right immediately after, 'But why not me? I’m human. This can happen to me ... this could happen to anybody.'"
For that reason, the couple decided to share the health incident with the world, in a post from the hospital on Instagram.
"We were rather conflicted to tell anyone about it, or to post about it," Ryan said. "We didn't want to come across as capitalizing off some sort of medical emergency."
Sutter said she's received an outpouring of support from fans and people she's never met and wants to "be that voice for people who have gone through something similar."
"A lot of people have shared that for them, [seizures are] an embarrassing thing that happened ... it's embarrassing to lose control of your body. And I think a lot of people feel alone out there, and I want them to know, they're not," she said.
While she may never know what caused the seizure or if it'll happen again, Sutter believes that stress may have played a role and vows to make some life changes.
"You do tend to just get wrapped up in daily life. I wanna try my hardest to not let the impact of what happened disappear. I want to be able to live my life fully and as best as I can without getting caught up in the minutia, you know, and the drama and the negativity. If there's any negativity, I wanna instantly, you know, shoo it away.
"Life is fragile. It's precious. And you need to take time and enjoy it and the people around you," Sutter added.
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