‘Dr. Pimple Popper’ Sandra Lee Suffers Health Scare While Filming Show

Dr. Sandra Lee, the viral dermatologist and star of Lifetime’s Dr. Pimple Popper: Breaking Out, is opening up after suffering a stroke during filming last November.

“It is very stressful to open yourself up,” Lee, 55, told PEOPLE ahead of the show’s premiere on April 20. “Especially as a surgeon, you always want to show yourself coming from an area of strength.”

Lee first started feeling strange while she was seeing patients for Dr. Pimple Popper: Breaking Out, telling the outlet she had what she thought was a “hot flash” and started feeling “super sweaty.”

After wrapping filming for the day, she went to her parents’ home, where she continued to feel “very restless” with “shooting pains” through her leg that evening. When she got up to get something to eat that night, she noticed she was having a “tough time” walking down the stairs, and by the morning, she knew there was something seriously wrong.

“I would hold my hand out, and it would just slowly collapse,” she recalled. “I noticed that I had a tough time articulating and just enunciating. I thought, ‘Am I having a stroke?’”

After being rushed to the emergency room, Lee was diagnosed as having suffered an ischemic stroke, which occurs when a vessel supplying blood to the brain is obstructed, according to the American Stroke Association.

“It was just a shock,” Lee said of the diagnosis. “As a physician, I couldn’t deny that I had slurred speech, that I was having weakness on one side, but I was like, ‘Well, this is a dream, right?’ … What essentially happened is I had a part of my brain that died.”

Lee said that looking back, she knows her blood pressure and cholesterol “were not under control,” and that she has “a lot of stress” in her life caring for patients and headlining a TV show.

Cameras immediately went down on Lee’s lifetime show as she spent the next two months recovering from her stroke via physical and occupational therapy, and she now takes blood thinners to reduce her risk of another stroke.

“Thankfully, I’m pretty much back to normal,” she said, adding, “It really makes you realize how precious life is.”

Despite the trauma of her stroke, Lee said she wants to think of it as a “blessing in disguise,” explaining that it has reminded her “to take better care” of herself.

“In Asian cultures in particular, they don’t tell people they’ve had a stroke because it can be seen as a sign of weakness,” she continued of coming forward with her story. “I want to get the word out that if you have symptoms like I had, make sure you see your doctor. Take care of yourself.”