Kelly Ripa Describes Spending 20 Scary Minutes Locked Out of Her Car With Dog Inside

Kelly Ripa is breathing a sigh of relief after a frightening mishap involving her beloved dog Lena left her panicked in a casino parking garage.

Per People in a Tuesday, May 26, report, the Live With Kelly and Mark cohost, 55, recalled accidentally locking Lena, her keys and even her phone inside her running car while attending a street festival in Palm Springs over Memorial Day weekend.

“I turned the car on, put the AC on to cool it down for Lena. But it’s locked,” Ripa explained, per the outlet, during Tuesday’s episode of the daytime talk show.

With no phone and no way to unlock the vehicle, the TV personality flagged down a stranger named Leo for help inside the casino garage.

“I said, ‘I’m so sorry. That is my car. I locked my keys and my human dog and my phone inside the car,'” Ripa shared, joking she called her dog a human dog because responders needed “to understand this is more than a dog, it’s a person.”

Thankfully, Lena remained safe thanks to the air conditioning still running while Ripa waited nearly 20 stressful minutes for help to arrive.

“It felt like three years,” the mom of three joked, according to People.

Once she finally got back into the car, Ripa said Lena hilariously popped her head up as if to say, “You have no idea” what she had just endured.

“She was like, ‘Girl!’ Thank God you had the air condition on. That was dangerous.”

Ripa later admitted she feared husband Mark Consuelos‘ reaction most of all.

“All I could think was, ‘Forget the dog, Mark is going to kill me,'” she joked.