The Same Old Love singer revealed on Instagram in September (17) that her best friend had donated a kidney to her and they had undergone the transplant surgery over the summer.

She opened up about her medical emergency on America's Today show in October, and shared that the surgery wasn't straightforward because one of her arteries flipped.

Grown-ish actress Francia has now explained how life-threatening the complication was in a new interview with W magazine.

"A few hours after our surgery, I woke up and had a text from her that said, 'I'm really scared,'" she recalled. "My kidney was very active, and when it turned I broke an artery. They had to take her into emergency surgery and get a vein from her leg and build a new artery to keep my kidney in place. She could have died."

The 25-year-old singer told the Today show that she began hyperventilating and "freaking out" because of the pain she started experiencing after undergoing the transplant.

"It was a six-hour surgery that they had to do on me, and the normal kidney process is actually two hours... Apparently one of the arteries had flipped. I'm very thankful that there are people who know what to do in that situation," she said.

Francia, 29, admitted to W magazine that they wanted to keep the procedure a secret because they didn't want to have to deal with the attention while in recovery.

"We didn't want to tell anybody because recovery was very hard for us, and we went through a depression at the time. We kind of just wanted to be normal and not have that attention on us," she said. "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?'"

Francia is now happy and healthy and enjoying success with her new TV show, where she met her "amazing new boyfriend".