Former RHOC Star Gretchen Rossi And Longtime Boyfriend Slade Smiley Expecting A Baby
Posted on Tue Dec 18th, 2018 11:15am PDT By X17 Staff
It's been a long road!
Former Real Housewives of Orange County star Gretchen Rossi, 41, and her longtime boyfriend Slade Smiley are expecting their first child, after a four year IVF ordeal.
"It’s pretty exciting that we have our little Christmas miracle,†the blonde reality star told People after making the announcement on The Doctors.
“It’s been a little bit harder than I definitely anticipated. I think they lie to you when they tell you you’re gonna get morning sickness. They lie to you — it’s all day sickness! But the good news is that my doctor told me that’s actually a good sign," the Bravolebrity explained of her pregnancy symptoms.
The engaged couple, who have been together for 10 years, had to undergo IVF, as Smiley had already gotten a vasectomy.
"We knew that we had to go through IVF in order to get pregnant. We went through a round of IVF and in that round we had 14 embryos that came out of that. We were so excited and just beyond ecstatic about the results. Then a doctor called saying that all of the embryos had arrested and basically died," she revealed.
"We were just beyond devastated. I couldn’t even get out of bed because you just go from such a high thinking within the next 24 hours you were going to be pregnant to losing everything and losing 14 embryos. That was really, really hard for me and Slade to come out of that," she added.
The loss led to a mental health crisis for the handbag line designer.
"I was in a deep depression after that. I’ve never really suffered through that or been in that circumstance before. We all get sad at times, but I really went into a depression and I couldn’t even think about or talk about IVF or trying to get pregnant again because physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually, it just breaks you," she admitted.
After going through another round of IVF, they managed to get two viable embryos, but that was their last shot at parenthood.
"I was scared. I was a 40-year-old woman going back in to try IVF. We went through two more rounds of IVF and we did not have the same amount of eggs and the same amount of embryos as we did the first round four years earlier. It was scary to sit there and think, ‘Oh my gosh, I retrieved 10 eggs.’ But out of 10 eggs, you only got one good embryo — one genetically sound embryo. And then the second round, the same thing happened. We only got two genetically sound embryos out of all of our rounds, so it was very nerve-racking going into this implantation because it was like, you only get two shots at this," she said.
Rossi is ten weeks along and due July 2019.
Congrats guys!