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Heidi Montag has been in full-on new-mum mode ever since welcoming her and husband Spencer Pratt’s son Gunner in October. She doesn’t have a nanny, only sleeps two hours at a time and hasn’t spent a day away from Gunner since he was born.
But she took a small break to pose for an intimate photoshoot for Paper magazine and chat about her life, where got very candid about her life-threatening plastic surgery procedures.
“Spencer thought he lost me,” Montag told Paper about electing to get 10 plastic surgery procedures done within 24 hours. “I died for a minute. With that much surgery, I had to have 24-hour nurse care and Spencer didn’t want to leave my side. I was at a recovery center and had Demerol to deal with the pain because it was so extreme. My security guards called Spencer and told him, ‘Heidi’s heart stopped. She’s not going to make it.’ And I easily could’ve.”
And the dangers of the procedures and recovery are not lost on her now. “Cutting yourself up isn’t something I’d recommend, and Demerol isn’t anything to play around with. That’s how Michael Jackson died.” (Editor’s note: Jackson died from an overdose of propofol. His cardiologist Conrad Murray was convicted of causing the death in 2011, and was released from jail in October 2013 after serving nearly two years of a four-year sentence.)
Montag described this moment in her life as “hitting rock-bottom” saying she can’t even recognize the person she was back then who risked life “for vanity.”
“A lot of positive things came out of that,” she said, acknowledging her relationship with God for helping her overcome the experience. “I had to look at myself in the mirror every day healing, and be like, ‘What did I do to myself? How did I get here? What is going on?’ I basically had to hit that rock-bottom moment in my life, to realize what was important to me.”
She also opened up about her and Pratt’s old reputation and reflected on the irony that the attention-seeking things they did (and were criticized for) years ago are actually popular today.
“Things that Spencer and I were shamed for, like, ‘Oh they’re so cheesy and over-the-top’ — now every A-list celebrity is doing, it’s just on their Instagram,” she explains. “It’s the exact same thing, and it’s being seen by maybe even more people than what we had done. It’s fascinating that that’s accepted now, but it was cheesy and fame-whorey when we did it.”
For now Montag is so focused on being a mum that she has no immediate plans to get back into reality TV, or her other notable career, music. But she’s not ruling anything out, including doing a gay club tour like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Girardi.
“I look at Erika Jayne and I’m like, ‘Wow, she’s older than I am and touring.’ So you never know,” she said.
This article originally appeared on PEOPLE
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