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In the Wednesday, Jan. 14 episode of her iHeart Radio podcast Untraditionally Lala, Lala Kent opened up about her “rare reaction” to a bug bite while on a prior vacation in Hawaii.
Kent, 35, recounted the incident to her mother Lisa Burningham after acknowledging Bethenny Frankel’s recent Instagram post regarding a bacterial infection she picked up vacationing in St. Barth’s on Jan. 4.
“You guys, OMG, I have to tell you guys a story,” Kent began. “So I wake up one morning and I look at my body and there’s like what looks to be little bites and it starts on my chest and on my back.”
Kent added that the rash was “gnarly.”
“And I’m like, this is freaking weird. I thought that maybe I brought like a sand mite home from uh Hawaii,” Kent explained, adding that she noticed “they’re becoming bigger and weird,” and that the bites were “itchy.”
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“I’m going to call it what it is. Boils. They were f—ing boils. Yeah, disgusting,” the Vanderpump Rules alum added, noting that they were “oozing.”
She went on to describe herself as “patient zero” and that a medical professional entered the room to lance the boils for testing while wearing a “hazmat suit.”
Testing determined that Kent did not have a bacterial infection, a staph infection, chicken pox, or monkey pox. Concerned about scarring, she then went to a dermatologist. “They put me on
a steroid, two steroid creams, an antibiotic, and a steroid oral. I was worried about scarring,” she explained.
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“Biopsy comes back and it’s most consistent with what looked like a rare reaction to
a bug bite. Yeah, so mine was not bacterial like Bethenny Frankel’s,” Kent said.
On Jan. 4, the Real Housewives alum, 55, posted a series of photos on Instagram from her vacation with her daughter Bryn and gave her followers a recap of how she spent her New Year’s Eve. The reality star shared that while on the island, she was “dealing with a bacterial infection.”
In the post, she included a close-up photo of the rash covering her face.
Frankel didn’t reveal what led to the infection. However, she explained in another video, “My entire face broke out in a rash.”
