Candiace Dillard saw her life flash before her eyes shortly after giving birth to her first child, a son named Jett, with husband Chris Bassett.
The “Real Housewives of Potomac” alum eventually discovered — and is being treated for — a blood clot in her left ovary, but the days leading up to that revelation were debilitating both physically and mentally.
“There were moments where I felt like I was going to die, like, if I’m just being very honest,” Dillard, who welcomed her baby boy on Oct. 3, tells Page Six in an exclusive interview.
“I remember saying that to Chris, like, ‘I feel like I’m going to die.’ And he’s like, ‘Don’t say that.’ And it was just really intense. Yeah, it was really scary,” she recalls, noting that she doesn’t “want to cry.”
But the R&B singer, 37, can’t stop her tears as she admits she began to spiral about what Jett’s future would look like without a mother.
“Am I going to live long enough for my my son to know me? … Am I on borrowed time? … Am I a ticking time bomb?” she thought to herself, confessing that she “still grapple[s]” with whether she’s “OK” and “doing everything [she’s] supposed to be doing.”
For the “foreseeable future,” she has to inject herself with anticoagulants twice daily.
Dillard credits her father, an emergency medicine physician, with making sure she sought help immediately.
She tells us she texted him all her symptoms, which included “a fever of 103 [degrees Fahrenheit]” and “excruciating lower abdomen pain,” which weren’t being remedied by round-the-clock “Tylenol and Ibuprofen.”
She explains she “couldn’t walk,” “sit up,” “eat” or “breastfeed.”
“When you have a brand-new baby, you want to mother. And that is just such an awful feeling — to not be able to mother my child,” she laments.
Dillard is also grateful for Bassett, who has three older children from two previous relationships, describing him as a “capable, amazing, active partner” who took care of both his wife and their infant in her time of need.
She goes on to praise her mom, Dorothy Watts — aka Jett’s “glam-ma” — for spending those first two weeks cooking, cleaning and singing her grandson the same lullabies she used to sing to Dillard.
As if her physical condition was not enough, the former Bravolebrity was also “dealing with postpartum blues and then feeling depressed.”
“The postpartum period is a very sensitive time, and it’s a time when you really have to listen to your body and not be afraid to say, ‘OK, this doesn’t feel right. This is not how this is supposed to be. This is not just regular postpartum. This is something else.’ And for me, it was something else,” she shares.
“You hear about people with blood clots, and they go to their lungs or their brain, and they’re out of here! And as a young, healthy woman who worked out my entire pregnancy, who has always eaten right, it’s, like, are you kidding me? Like, why? Like, why would I have this issue?”
The “Drive Back” hitmaker tells us she is now “in postpartum therapy” — which she “highly recommend[s], whether you are going through health problems or not” — at the behest of her obstetrician/gynecologist.
“Your brain is going through so much, and you have the biggest hormone drop of life when you give birth,” she emphasizes. “It can manifest in so many different ways, and you just don’t know what you don’t know.”
Dillard says she’s “been better, a lot better,” since getting her physical and mental health under control.
“I’ve been able to smother my baby, put on a little bit of makeup and can get into a routine that feels good to me,” reveals the former Miss United States winner, who adds that she doesn’t regret pausing labor for a few minutes to make sure her glam was on point for her son’s arrival.
Though her postpartum experience so far has been “the least fun, zero stars,” her pregnancy, labor (after her second epidural worked) and delivery were a breeze.
In fact, she gushes that as she began to crown, her doctor let her feel Jett’s “head and his little hair” before giving Dillard the OK to “pull him out” herself — à la Kourtney Kardashian.