It’s been less than a week since Selena Gomez revealed she received a kidney transplant over the summer as part of her lupus treatment, and over the weekend her donor was spotted in public.
Gomez has been besties with her donor, Francia Raisa, for over 10 years after the two women met at a fundraiser. Raisa starred in the ABC Family drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager and now works on a new show, Grown-ish.
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Raisa was spotted on the Los Angeles set of Grown-ish, a spinoff of the hit series Black-ish, on Friday. See the photos of the 29-year-old actress back at work here from The Blast.
While neither Gomez nor Raisa have shared specific details of the transplant so we’re not sure when the operation took place, we do know it occurred over the summer when Gomez took a break from promoting her new music. And given that Raisa is back at work (and the fact that Gomez and Raisa both felt comfortable enough to share the news) we can imagine that the operation went well without a hitch.
“There aren’t words to describe how I can possibly thank my beautiful friend Francia Raisa,” Gomez captioned a photo of her and Raisa holding hands in side-by-side hospital beds. “She gave me the ultimate gift and sacrifice by donating her kidney to me. I am incredibly blessed. I love you so much sis.”
Raisa also shared a photo of the two of them in the hospital, writing, “I am beyond grateful that God would trust me with something that not only saved a life, but changed mine in the process. This was part of our story, and we will share it soon, but what is important now is that this is not the only story. For more information regarding Lupus, please go to the Lupus Research Alliance website: www.lupusresearch.org — Love you sis, so glad we’re on this journey together.”
“Francia and Selena are like sisters,” a source close to Raisa told Us Weekly. “Selena is like a sister to her. Selena didn’t ask Francia to be tested as a match — Francia is the kind of person who would offer to do that for any one of her friends.”
Gomez was also spotted on Friday, but across the country in New York City arriving on the set of her new Woody Allen project with Timothee Chalamet.
Details surfaced of Gomez’s struggles with lupus this spring before her surgery, including a couple scary kidney failure incidents in April and May. It was reportedly after her first kidney-related trip to the hospital in April when she began the search for a kidney donor.
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