Vicki Gunvalson and Brooks Ayers are very much back together, but his health prospects are much more up in the air than their romantic status.
The Real Housewives of Orange County stars have been living together as Brooks battles cancer, but he tells Radar that the arduous battle continues.
According to Brooks, chemotherapy treatments to treat his “aggressive” cancer (Stage 3 Non-Hodgkins lymphoma) don’t seem to be having any effect.
“I am sick,” Ayers, who has battled the illness since 2013, admitted. “I do feel bad, but it’s mind over matter a lot of times. You gotta stay the course.”
Six months of chemotherapy and a largely liquid-based diet later, Gunvalson's live-in boyfriend says he was hoping things would have improved by now.
“When the test results came back, the numbers haven’t changed substantially,” he revealed. “They haven’t gotten worse, but they haven’t gotten better."
"That was kind of disheartening, to be honest with you.”
“I’m not so sure my body is responding to chemotherapy,” he admitted. “At least the cocktail that I was doing. I’m not sure it responded like it needed to.”
Ayers says he’s faced with three options, starting with an “aggressive form of chemotherapy” that would mean 3-4 days a week of treatment for months.
It's that, an experimental stem cell transplant, or a holistic approach, which one of their Real Housewives of Orange County co-stars is helping him with.
“Shannon Beador’s been very much in our corner, putting us in contact with a lot of unbelievable world-renowned holistic physicians,” he said.
“We’re exploring that and with that would come no chemo. It would be addressing and taking what I’ve been doing with the holistic diet and an infrared sauna.”
“It’s just assessing what my mentality, my body responds to and it’s been quite a daunting mental task,” the reality star admits, but he still has Vicki.
That, more than anything, gets him through the day these days.
“She keeps me up and going and it’s been good rather than just routine, monotonous life. That’s not what we’re about. So it’s been very good from that perspective.”
If you watch The Real Housewives of Orange County online, you know Brooks has always been polarizing, but life's latest turn has changed his outlook.
He says he will be back on the show, and is excited for it. Why?
“At the end of the day, we want to show that you don’t have to lay down and let this disease or the normal course of what we think cancer can do take you down."
“You can continue to have a life and you can continue to be strong mentally and the things that we can control, we can control. That’s what we’re doing.”
Here's wishing Brooks the best as he fights the good fight.
The End.
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