Celebrities Who Have Had Sepsis: Erin Bates, Billy Porter, Amelia Gray Hamlin and More

Some stars have continued to open up about their health battles — including with something as serious as septic shock.

According to the Mayo Clinic, sepsis is a serious condition in which the body improperly responds to an infection, causing the organs to work poorly.

In August 2025, Bringing Up Bates star Erin Bates went into septic shock after giving birth to her seventh baby, Henry.

“Erin developed a severe UTI and kidney infection, which sent her into septic shock,” Bates’ husband, Chad Paine, wrote via Instagram. “She is currently still in the ICU as doctors continue to treat, diagnose and search for answers. We would covet your prayers for this beautiful girl who is such a light in a dark world. We are holding onto God’s promises.”

Bates ended up suffering a seizure before eventually starting to regain her strength.

“With tears in our eyes, we are praising the Lord that we are on the road to recovery,” Paine wrote via Instagram in September 2025. “Your prayers have definitely touched heaven.”

Keep scrolling to learn more stars who have battled sepsis:

Erin Bates

The Bringing Up Bates star went into septic shock in August 2025 after developing a “severe UTI and kidney infection” following the birth of her seventh child, Henry. Bates suffered a seizure before slowly getting “on the road to recovery.”

Billy Porter

In September 2025, Porter ended his run on Broadway’s Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club due to a “serious case of sepsis.”

“Billy Porter must also withdraw from the production,” a statement shared via the show’s social media account read. “His doctors are confident that he will make a full recovery but have advised him to maintain a restful schedule.”

Amelia Gray Hamlin

After getting a nipple piercing, Lisa Rinna’s daughter ended up developing a serious infection from it while at a party at Coachella.

“[Amelia] was up on a balcony, somebody pushed her, kind of like, pushed her forward, and her boob went into a bush,” Rinna recalled on her and husband Harry Hamlin’s “Let’s Not Talk About the Husband” podcast in September 2025. “And it, like, jammed the nipple into the boob, and then she came home that night and all of a sudden she had a super high fever and her boob was this big.”

Rinna claimed that Amelia’s “boobs swelled up to this humongous size” after she visited an urgent care facility and got X-rayed.

“We didn’t know what to do, so we called an infectious disease doctor. She had to go to the infectious disease doctor!” she explained. “She had sepsis in her freaking boob. … She punctured something when she went into the bush, and she had sepsis and she had to be on IV antibiotics for a week. It was actually very dangerous, guys. It was dangerous. Anyway, they’re out now.”

Vicki Gunvalson

In August 2024, Gunvalson revealed that she had sepsis and only had a “10 to 20 percent” chance of survival.

On an episode of her “My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast,” Gunvalson recalled to her boyfriend, Michael Smith, that she went to the hair salon “as usual” earlier that day.

“So I got to the office … I had a client coming in and she said I was talking gibberish and I wrote an email out and the email didn’t make sense,” she explained, noting that the client was a “retired ER physician” who noticed something was off. “He got up and told [Michael’s daughter] Olivia that I was possibly having a stroke, we didn’t know. I don’t remember anything and [Olivia] took me to the hospital.”

The Real Housewives of Orange County star said she was misdiagnosed at the ER with a sinus infection and was discharged that night. (Gunvalson previously had a sinus infection, but seemed to be “doing better.”)

After getting discharged, Gunvalson was taking a bubble bath and “passed out” in it.

“I walk in and she’s pretty much passed out,” Smith recalled, describing “one of the scariest” moments of the incident. “I grabbed her, pulled her out of the water, put her in bed. The doctor said she just needed to sleep, so I put her in bed and she slept literally 13, 14 hours straight.”

When Gunvalson woke up she was disoriented, so Smith brought her to the emergency room again where they found she had a “massive infection.”

“It was actually sepsis, but it was pneumonia,” he explained. “And what happened — and I’m no doctor, but when they explained it — is that when your body is fighting that big of an infection and that dangerous of an infection, your whole body attacks it, which affects the brain and everything else in your body because your body sends everything it has to fight it.”

Gunvalson “doesn’t remember much,” and still has a lot of “trauma” from the experience.

“I cry a lot,” she said. “And Michael keeps saying, ‘Why do you keep crying?’ I don’t have an answer. I mean, rewind a week ago, we were in Barcelona walking 16 [to] 20,000 steps and we were having the time of our life. And three days later, [I’m in the hospital].”

John Daly

One year before being diagnosed with bladder cancer, the pro golfer was vacationing in England, when he was bitten by a brown recluse spider and went into sepsis. He was forced to undergo emergency surgery. (Daly is currently in remission from his cancer.)

Mikkey Dee

In January 2025, the Scorpions drummer developed sepsis after spraining his foot. He tried to soothe his pain with medication until his condition worsened.

“The ankle swelled up like hell, then it took on a weird shape and appearance and looked like an overcooked ham,” he told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in an interview at the time. “I became very ill so I had to go by ambulance to Sahlgrenska and there they found that I had sky-high values, so I became priority one there. It was surgery right away, the first of three. They cut away what was dead and infected and badly infested. It was not a good journey I was on. Another day and I’d be playing drums with Lemmy [Kilmister] in heaven. I can say that.”

Abby Lee Miller

In the summer of 2024, the Dance Moms alum suffered a UTI, which led to her contracting sepsis.

“I was at the end of my [Abby Lee Spills the Tea] tour … and I started to have trouble with my catheter,” she explained in a Daily Mail interview in September 2024. “It just needed to be changed. Every month I need to get it changed.”

Miller, who was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma in 2018 and has used a wheelchair ever since, said that a nurse was traveling with her, but she “didn’t feel comfortable” changing the catheter in the room she was in.

“I don’t know why, people do it all the time,” she said. “I held off for a day, which was a mistake. Then my back started hurting and my kidneys. I was screaming in pain.”

Miller was brought to a nearby hospital where she “laid in the emergency room for five and half hours waiting for someone to change [her] catheter.”

“I became [septic], and it went up in my kidneys,” she said, explaining that she remained in the ICU for four days.

“I snapped back,” she said. “My girlfriend from Pittsburgh told me, ‘I have not yet decided [whether] you are the unluckiest person in the world or the luckiest in the world.’”

Jamie-Lynn Sigler

Sigler shared in June 2024 that she had a “very bad reaction to a surgery” and developed sepsis.

“A little less than a year ago now is when I went to India and I lived in this ashram and I felt so awakened and connected and peaceful,” she shared on her “MeSsy” podcast. “And when I came home, two weeks later, I had a very bad reaction to a surgery and got sepsis and was in the hospital and almost died. I never told anybody this.”

The actress explained that 2023 became her “year of grieving” following the horrific incident.

“I had never in my life been more sad, felt more low,” she said. “But what I learned from India was I had an inability to escape it. I had to sit in it. I would scream in pillows, I would cry to girlfriends. I reached out, I sat by myself, I got a therapist. I did all of these things I had never really done before and went through this process that was absolutely necessary.”

Ashley Park

The Emily in Paris actress went into “critical septic shock” after a severe case of tonsillitis.

“While on holiday in December into New Years, what started as tonsillitis spiraled into critical septic shock, which infected and affected several of my organs,” Park wrote via Instagram in January 2024. “I am grateful that my health has improved despite what we had initially been told. Grateful most of all to Paul [Forman] for being unconditionally by my side through all this.”

After her heartfelt note to her boyfriend, Park noted that she “hesitated to share what’s been happening,” but she knows that she is now “safely on the other side of the worst.”

“Thanks for reading this. I’m sorry for being so absent recently [on social media] so much and to people in my life,” she said. “I love you all. I’m healing and I promise I’m gonna be okay ❤️.”

Whoopi Goldberg

In 2019, Goldberg battled pneumonia and sepsis, which nearly killed her.

“I am here. I am up and moving around. Not as fast as I’d like to be, but I am OK. I’m not dead,” she said in a message on The View in February 2019. “I came very, very close to leaving the Earth. Good news: I didn’t.”

Larry King

After contracting COVID-19, King passed away in January 2021 at the age of 87. Later that month, Larry’s wife, Shawn Southwick King, shared that King died from a sepsis infection “unrelated” to COVID-19.

“It was an infection, it was sepsis,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “He was finally ready to go, I will tell you that. You know, he never wanted to go, but his sweet little body was just, it had just been hit so many times with so many things, and once we heard the word COVID, all of our hearts just sunk. But he beat it, you know, he beat it, but it did take its toll, and then the unrelated infection finally is what took him, but boy, he was not gonna go down easily.”

Joshua Bassett

In June 2021, the singer shared that he thought he had food poisoning, but he ended up having heart failure and went into septic shock.

“[I] started getting very ill, and it kept getting worse,” he shared in an interview with GQ. “I thought it was, like, food poisoning or whatever. It got worse, it got worse, it got worse, it got worse.”

After experiencing “unimaginable pain,” he was admitted into the ER where they found that he was in septic shock and had heart failure.

“[The doctors] told me that I had a 30 percent chance of survival. They told me that if I had not checked into the hospital within 12 hours, I would have been found [dead] in my apartment,” he explained, noting he was “feeling much better” now.

Tyler James Williams

The Abbott Elementary star revealed in January 2023 that he found out he had Crohn’s disease when trying to gain muscle — and kept dealing with excruciating stomach pain with the inability to keep food down.

“I was really pushing my body to the limit. By the time December hit, it just crashed. Everything shut down,” he explained in an interview with Men’s Health, noting his bowels were extremely inflamed from Crohn’s disease and was rushed into emergency surgery to remove six inches of his lower intestine. After his intestines were unable to heal, he went into septic shock.

Williams shared that he spent the following months requiring an intravenous feeding system, which left him very weak.

“The last thought I had was, ‘This could be it. If this is it, I’m not happy. I worked a lot. I did a lot of things. I didn’t enjoy any of this. This can’t be it,’” he recalled before adding that he is now stronger than ever by learning to “have a better relationship” with his body. “The important thing for me, and those like me, to remember is that longevity is a big part of the game. If you can’t [stay strong] and be healthy, there really is no point.”

Patty Duke

The Oscar winning actress died in March 2016 from sepsis from a ruptured intestine.