Selena Gomez Transplant Scars Visible as She Soaks up Sun

Photos of Selena Gomez out in the sun in Sydney have surfaced, showing a scar from the actress’s kidney transplant last year.

The paparazzi shots, published by TMZ, show Gomez in a bikini enjoying the sunshine over the weekend. On Sunday, she laid out on a boat in Sydney harbor reading, and photographers noted the dull scar still visible on her inner thigh from her life-saving surgery.

In the process of her kidney procedure, an artery reportedly broke, putting Gomez in even more imminent danger. To repair the damage, surgeons had to remove a vein from her leg, creating a new artery to stablize the kidney. While the reporters saw clear skin over both of Gomez’s kidneys, the mark on her inner thigh was still just barely visible.

The second procedure was only recently explained by Gomez’s best friend, Francia Raísa, who donated one of her own kidneys to save the singer’s life. She told W Magazine about the artery complication.

“I woke up and had a text from her that said, ‘I’m really scared.’ My kidney was very active, and when it turned I broke an artery,” Raísa said, adding that doctors rushed Gomez back into surgery and removed a vein from her leg to build an artery to keep the new kidney in place.

“She could have died,” Raísa said. The scar was also glimpsed in December, when Gomez was out celebrating new year’s eve in Cabo San Lucas with her on-again off-again boyfriend, Justin Bieber.

Raísa shared the dramatic moment when she learned how sick her friend and roommate was, and how she immediately resolved to help in any way she could — including donating her own kidney.

“She was asking me about my day and she grabbed a water bottle out of the fridge and tried to open it and couldn’t. Then she threw it on the floor, and she fell to the floor and started crying,” Raísa said. “I was like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ She said, ‘I need a new kidney. I don’t know what I’m going to do, the waitlist is seven to 10 years.’ And it just came out of me, and I said, ‘I’ll get tested.’ I called her assistant behind her back to get the information, and that’s how the process started.”

The actress also admitted that recovering from the surgery was hard for both of them, and they spent some time off the radar before going back to their day-to-day lives.

“We didn’t want to tell anybody [about the surgery] because recovery was very hard for us, and we went through a depression at the time,” Raísa said. “We kind of just wanted to be normal and not have that attention on us. I really left it up to her. I’ve never had anything personal come out about me before. I’ve dated very famous people, and no one knows because I’m very private. I was like, ‘Did you have to be famous?’”