Francia Raisa considers Selena Gomez her family after donating a kidney to her longtime friend.
The 29-year-old Grown-ish actress opened up about the difficulties she faced following the surgery she and the "Fetish" singer underwent back in June.
"It’s harder as the donor because we are losing something our body didn’t need to lose, so trying to recover from that and she’s gaining something her body needed,” Raisa told Harry Connick Jr. (via Just Jared) during an upcoming appearance on his daytime talk show, Harry, airing Monday, Feb. 19. "So she’s up and at it immediately and I had a hard time.”
Raisa and Gomez revealed their surgery in September and spoke about the procedure with Today's Savannah Guthrie a month later. Since then, the two stars have each individually shared additional details about their recovery and experience.
“I basically have four scars," Raisa told Connick Jr. "It was laparoscopic. Those mothers out there who had C-sections, I feel you. I don’t know how you take care of a child afterwards. It is crazy. I couldn’t get up without having someone help me. That was very humbling. I couldn’t take a shower by myself. I had to have someone help me because I couldn’t move."
"I’m a very, very active person, so the fact that my doctor said I couldn’t move for two months, I couldn’t do anything active. All I could do was walk. That was very hard for me, and I have a dog. And every day the thing I look forward to is drinking my coffee, and walking, and I couldn’t do that. It was really, really hard," she continued.
Meanwhile, the Beyond Paradise star also revealed that Gomez "felt bad" about having her donate her organ, though the procedure strengthened their relationship.
"Our surgery was in June, our fans didn’t find out about it until September. We wanted that privacy. It was a big surgery. She felt bad about even having me do that because we are just friends, I am not her family or anything," Raisa explained. "Well, I am now. She has my blood. She felt bad. We just wanted our families around and it was cool because now I have a big family. I lost my grandparents when I was younger… Her grandparents are my grandparents now and so I have this extension of a family and it’s been really amazing.”
For more on Raisa and Gomez's kidney transplant, watch below.
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