The Bachelor alum Daisy Kent has opened up about another health crisis she faced as a teenager that threatened her life: meningitis.
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Daisy has shared personal details about her health problems over the years on social media, namely with Lyme disease and Meniere's disease.
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But according to The Bachelor alum, she also suffered from viral meningitis at age 19 while she was enrolled as a student at San Diego State University.
Daisy, who is trying to raise awareness for the meningitis vaccine, explained to Us Weekly that neither of her parents knew much about meningitis or how she could've been vaccinated at the time to prevent serious symptoms and/or complications.
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"I had this shocking pain going down my spine, I felt like knives were cutting into my back and down my neck," Daisy recalled to Us of when she had fallen ill in college.
"There was a point where they didn't think I was going to make it."
Daisy had a weakened immune system at the time, and so her case was pretty severe. She said it took about a year for her to fully recover.
"I kept thinking, 'My siblings are never going to know how much I love them. I'm never going to get to do everything I wanted to do in my future,'" Daisy admitted.
"When I got home my little sister hugged me and she was like, 'I thought you were going to snap in half.'"
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Daisy had lost 17 pounds at that time, and she added, "I just lost so much weight so quickly and I could barely walk."
Daisy opened up to Joey on The Bachelor's 28th season about a health crisis she had endured for years, which included gradual hearing loss that was "the loneliest pain" she'd ever felt.
Daisy began having stroke-like seizures when she was 11-years-old, but doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her for years.
Her health worsened to the point where she had to move in with her parents.
"I physically just laid in bed all day. I couldn't get up. My head always hurt. My ears would ring so loud and I had vertigo all the time," she recalled in a TikTok video she posted earlier this month, adding, "It got really bad, to the point where I wasn't even functioning."
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She was finally diagnosed with Lyme disease at age 21, and she eventually went to an inpatient treatment center in Germany to treat her symptoms.
After more than a month of injections, infusions, whole-body hypothermia, plasmapheresis, an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, and more, Daisy finally felt better and was able to begin living a normal pain-free life.
Daisy, however, didn't regain her hearing.
Daisy shared on Instagram earlier this year, "Losing my hearing felt so isolating, and it really impacted my self-esteem... I went from being a social butterfly to someone who did not like being in groups or around other people at all."
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And so Daisy received the cochlear implant in March 2023 and activated it the following month.
"Daisy is resilient... and to have that be the person that you're with, it's a huge trait that you can look to," Joey told The Bachelor cameras, adding, "I can see Daisy being someone I end up with at the end of all this, and it's exciting!"
But Daisy finished Joey's The Bachelor season in second place behind winner Kelsey Anderson.
Joey and Kelsey got engaged during the March season finale and are still together now, and Daisy has moved on with a new boyfriend, Thor Herbst.
"Being on The Bachelor and seeing how so many people related to my story and some of the health things I've gone through has really made me want to talk more about it," Daisy told the magazine.
"If I can help even just one person by talking about it then it makes all the difference to me."
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