If HGTV has taught us anything then it is that the married couples that renovate houses together remain spouses forever, we specifically saying about our favorite couple Erin and Ben Naples but many people do not know that the seemingly perfect life of Erin Naples has its own dark past.
On camera Erin is always a glowing personality, but just before the show a mysterious illness had robbed her of her joy for nearly 10 years.
Erin Naple’s long struggle with poor health goes all the way back to when she was 19 years old, when she first began to face severe health complications.
In the beginning it would be 24 hours of terrible stomach pain and a low grade fever then it would disappear. it went on to grow worse and worse it was around that time that she also met her future husband ben for the first time 16 years ago.
As both of them attended the Jones County Junior College in Mississippi for their education. Ben was the college superstar as president of multiple clubs and Erin calls it somewhat of a celebrity crush on him.
Ben was also instantly attracted to Erin, who sported a pixie cut since back then which made her even more attractive.
They eventually met several times over the years, but when Erin met him to take the yearbook interview was the time they really connected and instantly knew they would be the perfect pair.
six days later they were married on November 22 2008; however after one of the happiest days in both their lives, Erin’s mysterious health problem grew even more painful that would put her out of commission for 2 to 3 days and sometimes even close to a week.
They took all kinds of tests to find out what was going on including a CT scan which produced no results.
It was only in 2014 after the couple got the offer to shoot the pilot from HGTV for what would be their show “Home Town”, that Erin went in emergency exploratory surgery upon the advice of her OBGYN.
The surgery was successful to determine that a tissue was covering all of her internal organs and binding them together.
She had a secondary surgery which made further discovery that it was scar tissues as the result of a perforated appendix rupturing and then the body trying to heal itself, which was probably the first pain she sensed when she was 19 years old.
while like the couple’s worst fear of it being cancer were not true, the tissue did seem to have spread like cancer but luckily she was treated but not without a cost.
The medical personnel had told the couple that while it was a non-life-threatening health problem, the damage it had done for around a decade could cost Erin her fertility.
the news that she may never have children hit Erin like a freight train as she had dreamed about having children for a long time.
It was a difficult thing for she and her husband to process but they may have to adopt and it even that fails then live the rest of their life with just each other.
Luckily, if sometimes bad things happen to good people then sometimes miracles also happen to them.
the couple found out that they were pregnant with their first child, three years later in 2017 and that too on Mother’s day.
They welcomed their baby daughter Helen Napier in January 2018. While Erin Napier’s health complications of the past have come to an end, she earlier this year also revealed that she may have had the coronavirus.
“ I’ve been hesitant to share this because I worried it might cause alarm but the more i’ve considered it, I think it’s something worth discussing so we can hopefully raise the alarm for the importance of serological testing for covet19”
She wrote in a march 20th in her Instagram post.
She revealed that after she and her husband had returned from New York on January 9th after appearing in the Today Show as guests. Later on January 20, she woke up with some gastrointestinal problems but being a woman whose large part of the life was spent battling such abdominal pain due to the health condition we read about she thought nothing of it.
Later that day, she kept getting chill and had a mild fever so she took some fever medications and it went away. However, after a couple of days more symptoms arose which she wrote in her journal “I feel like I have a cold, but not really. It’s like a half cold, no congestion but I can’t stop coughing still have a low fever.”
She tested negative for the flu but she kept having on again off again fevers and unproductive cough that medications were not having an effect on for weeks. It was a viral thing and by February 20th she was completely healed.
she wouldn’t have thought so much of it but her daughter, Helen and her 64 year old mother also came down with similar symptoms.
Luckily they were also healed shortly after but by then it COVID-19 had appeared in New York and was growing in numbers by the hundreds.
Her doctor friend suggested that the lack of lymphocytes in her blood could be a sign that she was infected with coronavirus, almost two months before the first case even appeared in New York but it can’t be said with certainty.
Yet it’s thankful that even if it was COVID-19 Napier and the rest of her family are all right and her husband Ben that fortunately did not contract the virus.
Erin has had more than her share of health scares in life, back in 2014 as well while she was treated from her long-term mysterious health problem, her father-in-law had to undergo a bypass surgery at 60 years old which was psychologically hard for her husband.
You can catch more of ben and Erin in their latest season of hometown which aired earlier this year.
