Influencer Lexi Reed Rattled by Hospitalization: 'I Didn't Realize How Quick Your Health Can Turn'

Now recovering at home but unable to walk on her own, the weight loss influencer tells PEOPLE that she worries about being a "burden" on her husband

By

Published on February 25, 2022 01:47 PM

More than a month after her organs started to fail and Lexi Reed landed in the hospital, the weight loss influencer is back home and recovering, but still working on reckoning with the drastic turn in her health and accepting her new limitations.

Reed, 31, had to be rushed to the emergency room on Jan. 20 after four days of being unable to keep any food down. Almost immediately after she arrived, Reed's blood sugar dropped and her organs started to fail, and doctors put her on a ventilator and in a medically induced coma.

Reed doesn't remember any of that day, and only learned how close she was to dying after she was brought off the ventilator and woken up about a week later.

"I don't even remember leaving the house," Reed tells PEOPLE. "I'm just happy that I'm still alive because the emergency room told [her husband] Danny if he didn't bring me that day, I could have died."

That she went from her daily life to severely sick is still a shock.

"I can't believe that I just went from healthy and taking advantage of my life to this," she says. "I didn't realize how quick your health can turn."

After nearly a month in the hospital, Reed is now back at home, but extremely limited. One leg is numb and swollen, keeping her from being able to walk, and her kidneys and liver are weakened, which means she needs to get dialysis three times a week for three and a half hours.

"The days leading up, I could go to the gym, I could go on walks. I felt healthy, like nothing was wrong with me. And then just all overnight, my kidneys are failing, I'm in a coma and I'm in the hospital," she says. "And then now I can't walk. It completely just did a 360 to my life."

Reed is going to various doctors to figure out what went wrong — which is still unknown, she says — and what her next steps are, but it's been a slow process because she didn't sign up for health insurance. Reed says she may need kidney and liver transplants, but the hope is that they'll heal on their own.

"It's all just going to take time," she says. "We're kind of in limbo, just trying to figure out how it happened so fast."

RELATED VIDEO: Weight Loss Influencer Lexi Reed Hospitalized After Her 'Organs Started Failing'

Reed says it's been "hard" to mentally deal with these changes, and she worries about the "burden" she's putting on Danny.

"It's no fun being stuck while everybody lives their lives and you want to be independent," she says. "Thankfully Danny's here all the time and he takes care of me, but even with that I feel bad. He has to take me to the bathroom and help me get comfortable and lift me if my leg falls out of the chair, because I literally can't lift it off the ground."

Amid all of the questions, Reed is trying to stay positive.

"I'm just trying to keep my head up and think that it's going to get better," she says. "I want to use this as a way to show people that you can always come back from a setback, and no matter what happens to us, we can always fight through it and get to the other side."