Heidi Montag is reflecting on her November 2009 plastic surgery overhaul — including getting part of her “chin sawed off” — and how it impacted her final season of “The Hills” with husband Spencer Pratt.
“At the time, my surgeon was like, ‘Oh, it will be a quick recovery, a few months.’ And it took me over a year to heal, so I could barely talk [with] my jaw,” the “Superficial” singer, 37, says on Pvnew’s “Virtual Reali-Tea” podcast.
“I just had part of my chin sawed off,” she continues. “It was really a lot just dealing with that.”
At the age of 23, Montag notoriously underwent a whopping 10 cosmetic procedures at once — shortly before production picked up for the sixth and final season of “The Hills.”
The surgeries, performed by the late Dr. Frank Ryan, included a chin reduction, updated breast augmentation, rhinoplasty revision, brow lift, liposuction, facial fat injections and pinning her ears back, among others.
“I wasn’t even in a place [to film]. And I kept saying, ‘I’m not a person right now. I need to heal and recover and I’m not doing well physically.’ Like, I’m not able to show up like I was,” the reality star recalls telling MTV producers.
“I thought I’d bounce back and be able to be on TV like I was after my first cosmetic surgery,” continues Montag, who had a boob and nose job years prior. “But there was just way too much done and each thing took too much time and it hurt so bad.”
She adds, “I was just in such an immense amount of pain.”
Montag — who acknowledges that the succession of surgeries was “obviously [her] choice” — says she wasn’t “aware of the repercussions,” including a near-death experience.
“They called Spencer at a point and told him I had died basically. I wasn’t doing well,” she says of her post-op scare.
She explains that, at one point, her heart was beating only five times per minute after she was allegedly administered the incorrect dose of the opioid Demerol for pain relief.
“We had to have nurses at the house for months to help me recover,” Montag says of the aftermath.
“So we’re dealing with that and then we have these producers like, ‘Say this and that.’ And we’re like, ‘We can’t do this.’”
The couple — known to fans as “Speidi” — eventually bowed out of “The Hills” halfway through Season 6.
Today, though, they’re claiming more time in the spotlight with a new podcast, “Speidi’s 16th Minute,” part of Spotify’s The Ringer Podcast Network.
“Sometimes nobody knows what is going on with the paparazzi set-up,” Montag tells us of the project that explores the underbelly of reality TV and its impact on pop culture.
“So it’s kind of an inside scoop, too, of Hollywood … sharing that inside information that people don’t want to necessarily divulge.”
