Teddi Mellencamp is opening up about her health journey since learning she had multiple tumors and underwent emergency brain surgery last month.
The former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star returned to her and Tamra Judge’s iHeartRadio podcast, Two Ts in a Pod, on Thursday, to recall her recent scary experience. “I can say I’ve had some of my darkest, saddest days since [Feb.] 12th when this happened,” Mellencamp said. “But leading up to it, it’s so wild what kind of transpired to kind of get us here.”
She recalled having symptoms prior to her diagnosis, including “the worst migraine” of her life while at a horse show. Mellencamp noted that she also couldn’t “remember how to say certain words,” was “shaking really bad” and didn’t know where she was at one point while riding a horse.
Her health only got worse when she went to New Orleans with Judge the next day, adding that she was in “such extreme pain” that she “could barely walk.” Judge noted that she was also concerned at the time and encouraged Mellencamp to go to a hospital as she suspected “something’s not right.”
Once they got through the weekend and Mellencamp returned home, she still felt “terrible” and asked a friend to take her to the hospital a few days later. “I started, like, sobbing to her and I’m like, ‘I need you to take me to the hospital right now. I think I’m dying. I can’t see, I can’t walk, I can’t even get out of bed,’” Mellencamp recounted. She noted that her estranged husband Edwin Arroyave ultimately took her to the hospital as her friend was unable to at the time.
The reality star admitted that though her head has been hurting for six months, she “didn’t want to face any of it” because “so much bad stuff was going on right then” and was focused on moving forward with her life. However, once she finally got a CT scan at the hospital, doctors told Mellencamp that she had “over seven tumors.”
Mellencamp said she underwent a craniotomy with tumor resection and that doctors removed four tumors from her brain.
“The hardest part is that nobody wanted to tell me what was really happening because they were scared, and so I didn’t know what was happening,” Mellencamp explained as she broke out in tears. “I thought I was fine, Like, I thought I could go home the next day, and, like, once the tumors are out, I thought I would be done. I can’t even tell you guys, like, I really didn’t understand anything and it was such a bummer.”
She added, “I know that I make everything seem pretty good and peachy, but it was a bad 17 days for everyone in my life. And the fact that my dad helped me and that he’s still helping me, yeah, has really been a game changer.” Mellencamp is the daughter of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame singer John Mellencamp.
She then underwent immunotherapy because she had two more tumors in her lungs and three more in her brain that were “too risky to remove” during surgery. “Something a lot of people have been confused by when they hear like brain tumors or lung tumors or anything like that, is they’re thinking it’s something other than melanoma, but what can actually happen is melanoma can metastasize and the organs to your other organs, and that’s what happened to me. So all of my tumors and whatnot are melanoma,” she explained.
Mellencamp told Judge that she’s feeling “really positive” as she prepares to start radiation on March 17 for a week, as well as continuing immunotherapy every three weeks.
“I wish the second that I felt those headaches, I wish the second that I started not feeling like myself, I would have gone to the doctor and gotten checked,” she said. “If I had waited any longer, God knows what would have happened.”
Mellencamp first revealed in 2022 that she had been diagnosed with Stage 2 melanoma. She continued to document her health journey on social media, sharing on March 6, 2025, that post-emergency brain surgery scans showed that she still had cancer.
“Update from my scans today: I have multiple tumors in my brain that weren’t able to be removed via surgery. I also have 2 tumors in my lungs. These are all metastases of my melanoma,” she wrote on Instagram. “The doctors are hopeful that immunotherapy will effectively treat them.”
Mellencamp starred on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on seasons eight through 10 (2017-20). When her contract was not renewed, she said she learned the news through friends and the media rather than from Bravo directly and was “blindsided” by the decision.
Read the full article here
