The Valley star Janet Caperna lost 20 pounds in nearly two weeks following a recent bout with acute gastritis.
“It’s usually set off by something like food poisoning and it was just wreaking havoc on my body,” Caperna, 36, told the Daily Mail on Friday, January 16, of her recent health scare. “It was like my insides were wrung out and it felt like I had hot glass moving through me.”
Caperna was hospitalized twice after going out on New Year’s Eve. When she couldn’t stop vomiting, the Bravolebrity initially thought her symptoms were the result of either food poisoning or a hangover. Acute gastritis, according to the Mayo Clinic, occurs when the stomach lining is suddenly inflamed but can go away with treatment.
According to Caperna, she felt “no relief” for 12 days.
“I look sick, so I can’t just start going about my normal life again and not say something, because if I post on Instagram people are gonna be like, ‘Are you OK?’” she told the outlet, referring to her unexpected weight loss. “I don’t want to glamorize looking like this because I look genuinely ill.”
Janet further opened up about her health scare during the Friday episode of her and her husband Jason Caperna’s “This Side of the Hill” podcast.
“I think you guys said I had a little bug, which is what I wish it was. It ended up being a lot more intense than that,” she said, returning to the show for the first time in weeks. “I wanted to share an update because I got so sick that I lost a ton of weight, and it’s going to be really noticeable.”
Janet continued, “I had a pretty serious health scare over the past two weeks that was really, really not fun.”
Once Janet noticed that she could barely “hold down water” after five days, she visited a local emergency room for treatment.
“I was, like, ‘I really don’t want to die of dehydration.’ I was afraid if it went more days, it’d get more and more dangerous,” she explained. “I was so grateful [that the nursing team] gave me an IV. I was able to have a couple sips of water and keep it down.”
While Janet was subsequently discharged, her symptoms persisted.
“A couple hours went by and I went right back to throwing everything up,” she said, noting she went back to the hospital within days. “They started poking around at my stomach and ran some tests.”
Janet further recalled that her pain felt “worse than childbirth.” (Janet and Jason, 42, welcomed son Cameron in December 2023.)
“It felt like everything from my lower esophagus down into my lower belly was on fire,” she said. “It felt like I was being squeezed from the inside. It felt like childbirth, but constant. I was in so much pain and it wouldn’t go away.”
Janet was ultimately diagnosed with acute gastritis and subsequently sent back home with medicinal prescriptions.
“This continues on for a period of two weeks, and I’m finally on the other side of it now,” she stated. “It comes in little waves now, but manageable nausea and it’s getting better every single day.”
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