Abby Lee Miller has bravely opened up for the first time about the terrifying moment she nearly died after contracting sepsis from a UTI this summer.

The 59-year-old Dance Moms star was left screaming in excruciating pain when her catheter dislodged just days after she wrapped her Abby Lee Spills the Tea tour in the UK back in July.

Speaking to DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview, the brash TV personality recalled how she was rushed to a London hospital and spent four days in the ICU.

Abby Lee – who remains in a wheelchair after being diagnosed with Burkitt Lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – said she was made to wait more than five hours on a bed in the emergency room before panicked doctors realized the severity of the situation.

‘I was at the end of my tour,’ she said. ‘We started at the Dance World Cup in Prague. I taught 13 classes and there were 9,500 kids there. From there we went to Scotland and then to Liverpool and then to London.
I was leaving town the next day and I started having trouble with my catheter. It just needed to be changed. Every month I need to get it changed. I had a nurse with me, and she didn’t feel comfortable doing it in the room. I don’t know why, people do it all the time.

‘So, I held off for a day which was a mistake. Then my back started hurting and my kidneys. I was screaming in pain. My two assistants called the paramedics, and the paramedics came and they took me to the Emergency Department.’

Poking at the overstretched NHS, she continued: ‘With the wonderful free health care there – it happens in every emergency room – I laid in the emergency room for five-and-a-half hours waiting for someone to change the catheter. I became sepsis, and it happened in my kidneys.’

She told DailyMail.com that she didn’t understand the severity of her own situation at the beginning.

‘They kept screaming my name: “Abigail, Abigail, Abigail,”‘ she said. ‘I was like, “I am right here. Stop screaming.”

‘They were asking me questions and I was making fun of them. I was like “why are we discussing this I just need my catheter changed? Can you get me out of here?”’

‘I was supposed to be flying home the next day,’ she added. ‘I was in the intensive care unit for four days.’

The dance choreographer gave harrowing details about the painful procedures she endured while in the undisclosed London hospital, including having multiple IV lines in her arms and neck.
‘They took me to another department, and they had me turning my head this way looking to my left,’ she said. ‘They kept saying, “Look at the screen, look at the screen.”

‘I would look at the screen and it was a sonogram. The last time I did something like that it was for a blood clot. I thought to myself, “Oh my God I think I have a blood clot.”

‘The guy was like, “No.” Then bam. They put a line in my neck. A central line in my neck. I had a TV remove control hanging out of my neck.’

She said the moment was more terrifying than undergoing emergency surgery for cancer.

Ultimately, it was determined that a UTI was to blame for the scare.

‘I got a UTI,’ she said. ‘My blood sugar was dropping, and I went sepsis. Women need to be very careful because a UTI can do a lot of damage. It can do a lot of different things.

‘It was very serious, and it can turn very quickly like that. If I would have changed the catheter the night before, none of this would have happened.’

But it wasn’t just the health scare itself that scared Abby Lee, but a patient with bandaged hands who was with her in ICU.

‘I was scared to death of him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t sleep for four days because I thought he was going to kill me.’
She also revealed her hospital stay delayed her return to the US which in turn allowed her to secure a business meeting and film a TV spot that she would not have been offered had she left a week prior.

‘On a positive note, I had a meeting with a very influential top notch television station,’ she said.

‘I was discharged on Thursday and on Friday I was in hair and make-up and on camera. I was just filming a fun silly stuff. But still, I snapped back.’

She continued: ‘I want to work. I like to work, and I feel like I have a lot to present to the world still. And I get the job done…

‘My girlfriend from Pittsburgh told me, “I have not yet decided you are the unluckiest person in the world or the luckiest in the world.”‘

Her latest scare is one of many health battles that Abby, who was sentenced to one year and one day in prison after being convicted of fraud in May 2017, has faced in recent years.

(Armani)

A Lancashire woman’s ‘flu’ symptoms turned out to be the telltale signs of a little-known, aggressive cancer that affects one in a million people.

Emma Snape, 34, began to come down with traditional cold-like symptoms in February, which quickly escalated, landing her in hospital.

Doctors at first diagnosed pneumonia, a serious and sometimes life-threatening lung infection.

Yet further tests showed the underlying illness to be epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE) — an extremely rare form of cancer than forms in the cells that line the blood vessels.
EHE is most commonly associated with young and middle-aged adults, and is more common in women.
One of the signs of EHE is a dry cough that causes difficulty breathing.

Other symptoms include a lump or swelling in the soft tissue of the body under the skin, and stomach pain along with weight loss if the disease is present in the liver.

When Emma was diagnosed, doctors found 20 nodules in her lungs and more in her omentum — the fatty tissue extends from the stomach to the intestines.

Doctors said her disease was terminal. Only half of those diagnosed with the condition will live longer than five years, studies show.

Emma has since been in and out of hospital for dozens of appointments and treatments.

Speaking of the ordeal, Emma’s twin sister Kym, a mother of two, said: ‘[It’s been] heartbreaking to watch her go through this.
It’s technically a terminal diagnosis as there’s no cure for it. It’s been the hardest year.

‘With her being my twin, it’s been so hard for me not being able to control this situation and make her better as she is literally my other half.’
Emma, also a mother of two, described her sister as ‘the real superwoman’, referring to her unwavering help in her time of need.

‘I don’t know what I’d have done without Kym,’ she said. ‘From day one after getting my diagnosis she’s been full into research, fundraising, gathering all sorts of different contacts to help me, whilst having her own young family to care for.

‘It’s been so wonderfully overwhelming how generous and kind people have been. Everyone just wants to help, my work, small businesses, family and friends.
People really have come together for me.’

Kym addded that that some days her sister suffers ‘agonising pain’ due to her condition.

‘She’s fighting against this disease every day whilst remaining the world’s best mummy to her two boys and partner.’

Kym has set up a donation page to raise money for the EHE Rare Cancer Charity (EHERCC), which is working hard to find a cure.

She has so far garnered over £6,000 from big-hearted locals and will take on a sponsored run in November to help pull in further cash.
Kym, said: ‘I have taken control in the only way possible which is to learn about this disease and to raise money for critical research to take place in the hope of finding a cure.’

(Armani)

Silvio Scaglia really must be a financial genius: the model agency owner somehow manages to be both a globetrotting billionaire and helplessly destitute at the same time! They don’t teach that at Wharton!

Characteristically, Scaglia — who is locked in a vicious legal battle with his soon-to-be-ex wife and former business partner, Julia Haart — appears to have spent the summer hopping private jets and yachts around all the usual Euro enclaves with his new partner Michelle Marie Heinemann.

What’s confusing, however, is that — according to court documents leaked to Page Six — back in May, the Italian businessman wrote to a New York judge pleading poverty.

Haart and Scaglia met in 2015 through a business deal. She later took a job at his modeling agency, Elite World Group, which has repped Kendall Jenner, Adriana Lima, Irina Shayk, Winnie Harlow and Behati Prinsloo, among many others. They married shortly after, in 2019.
But when Haart told Scaglia in 2022 that she planned to divorce him, he fired her from EWG — setting in motion a series of brutal court cases over both the marriage and the company.

We’re told that in May, Scaglia notified the court that the he was tapped out.

“I am currently unable to bear the financial burden of the ongoing litigation against [Haart], nor can I afford to sustain the fees for my own legal counsel,” he wrote.
Scaglia has been trying unsuccessfully to get permission from the court to sell the Tribeca triplex where he and Haart had lived during their marriage, and where Haart still resides.

“Following the latest judicial decision concerning [the apartment] and the dismissed hope of obtaining permission to sell it, I have dramatically curtailed my expenditures to a bare minimum,” he wrote.

He says he also moved back to Italy because the cost of living is lower there, and asked for a freebie court-appointed lawyer to represent him in the case.
But an insider told us they were surprised — after his claim to be in dire financial straights — to see Heinemann posting scenes from their opulent life on her Instagram feed.

According to the account, she and Scaglia have been in Tuscany, Zurich (where she posted a shot of herself on a private jet with a bottle of Ruinart champagne), Madrid, Sicily, Sardinia (where they appear to have got around by convertible, a yacht and, again a private jet) and Ireland.
Asked to explain how he’s both broke and living an apparently ultra-luxe lifestyle, Scaglia told us: “The parasitic vulture, Julia Haart, continues to try and destroy the happiness and love that my beautiful and kind wife and I share.”

Her threw some other barbs at Haart, but didn’t address the financial schizophrenia.
After we asked him about the luxe travel, Heinemann appeared to have removed the shots featuring jets and yachts from her account.

(Armani)