6 Things We Learned About Selena Gomez’s Kidney Transplant In ‘Today’ Interview

Selena Gomez, who had been suffering from Lupus for the past few years, revealed last month that she had a kidney transplant over the summer and now she’s opened up to “The Today Show” co-host Savannah Guthrie about the whole process.

In a two-part interview, which aired the first half on Monday and will follow with the second on Tuesday, Gomez spoke with the news anchor about receiving a kidney donation from her good friend and fellow actress Francia Raisa, who joined her at for the interview, as well. They both discussed what the surgery procedure entailed, what the post-operation recovery was like and how Gomez has been feeling since the whole ordeal.

Here are 6 things we learned from the interview::

1. With her kidneys shutting down, Gomez was only weeks away from dialysis.

“I had arthritis,” Gomez told Guthrie. “My kidneys were shutting down. My mentality was just to keep going.”

Though she was trying to stay strong mentally, she couldn’t save her kidneys from failing and she needed a transplant or she would’ve been on dialysis in just a few weeks, according to the interview.

2. It was by total chance that Gomez ended up receiving a kidney from Raisa.

All of Gomez’s family members had been tested to see if they were a donor match, but they weren’t. She felt defeated because she didn’t want to tell any of her friends or ask them to get tested, but she was also scared because the donor list was so long. But she was living with Raisa at the time, and one day, Gomez just broke down and told her everything.

“One day she came home, and she was emotional,” Raisa said. “I hadn’t asked anything. I knew that she hadn’t been feeling well. She couldn’t open a water bottle one day and she chucked it and just started crying.”

After Gomez shared that she needed a transplant, but the list to get one was years-long, the idea to get tested “just vomited out” Raisa’s mouth.

“Of course I’ll get tested,” Raisa had told Gomez.

It turned out that she, though Gomez’s family was not, was a match.

“The fact that she was a match, I mean, that’s unbelievable,” Gomez said.

3. Raisa’s mom was conflicted about her donating a kidney.

Because Raisa was agreeing to serious surgery, she had to write a will, in case the outcome of the procedure wasn’t as planned. She was scared about it all, but knew she wanted to do this for Gomez. Her mother, on the other hand, was conflicted.

She was scared for her daughter, but “she loves Selena and so she was torn,” Raisa told Guthrie.

She revealed that her mom didn’t even want to be at the hospital until she woke up.

4. There was a complication with Gomez’s transplant.

Post-surgery, Gomez returned to her hospital room to try to get some sleep, but “in the middle of that process, I started hyperventilating and there was so much pain there,” she said while motioning to where she had the transplant.

She learned that the kidney had turned around in her body and that she needed to go back into surgery.

“I was freaking out. It was a six-hour surgery that they had to do on me, and the normal kidney process is actually two hours,” the “Wolves” singer said. “Apparently one of the arteries had flipped. I’m very thankful that there are people who know what to do in that situation.”

5. Gomez got a space for her and Raisa to recover in together.

“What I wanted more than anything was that we were together,” the former Disney star said of wanting recover with Raisa. “So I actually got a space for us to be in together.”

Once they were settled in their space, the real recovery began.

“You’re on bed rest, you’re allowed to walk an hour a day,” Gomez said. “ You can’t do any stairs or anything crazy.”

“We couldn’t take showers by ourselves,” Raisa added. “ It was a really brutal process.”

6. The surgery has fixed a lot of Gomez’s health issues.

“As soon as I got the kidney transplant, my arthritis went away,” Gomez said. “My lupus, there’s about a 3 to 5 percent chance it’ll ever come back. My blood pressure is better. My energy, my life has been better.”

The second half of “The Today Show” interview with Selena Gomez airs Tuesday on NBC.