Trista Sutter sat down for an interview with Good Morning America, which aired on Tuesday, June 20, less than three weeks after she suffered a violent seizure on a family vacation in Croatia.
“All I remember was feeling very dizzy and nauseous, and the next thing I knew, I was in this dream,” the Bachelorette alum, 44, recalled of the health scare. “The only way I can describe it was like a white euphoria.”
Trista and her husband, Ryan Sutter, whom she met on the ABC reality series in 2003, were on an adventure tour with their son, Maxwell, 9, and daughter, Blakesley, 8, when she began convulsing. “I heard Blakesley screaming, ‘Mommy, Mommy!'” Ryan, 42, recounted. “Trista had fallen onto Blakesley in a sort of convulsive state.”
Ryan was terrified by his wife’s seizure, despite being a trained EMT. “I was checking her pulse. She was shaking and stiff. Her eyes were wide open, rolled back in her head, sort of looking up,” he said. “She wasn’t breathing. She was turning sort of blue.”
Trista, who said her daughter was “traumatized” by the scare, was rushed to a nearby hospital in the European country, though doctors did not find anything wrong with her. Now that she’s back home in the United States, she plans to visit a neurologist so that she can be cleared to drive again. She believes stress may have played a role, but did not have any symptoms, other than headaches, prior to the episode.
“It’s changing my life, still is, to this day,” the former reality star said on GMA. “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. I have to have a new perspective in order to keep me and my family and everyone around me safe.”
Going forward, Trista hopes to be an advocate for people who have suffered similar health scares. “I think a lot of people feel alone out there, and I want them to know they’re not,” she said.
