Sharing her story. For the first time, Lea Michele is opening up about her struggles to conceive and carry her first child, Ever.
The Glee alum, 34, told Katherine Schwarzenegger on Thursday, March 25, about her and Zandy Reich trying to have a child after her polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis. “It’s easy to manage it in your daily life, but when you’re trying to conceive, it’s much harder, especially if you have extremely irregular periods. You never really know when you can get pregnant,” the actress explained. “On top of that, I had to have multiple procedures to remove polyps and cysts and scar tissue.”
In fact, when the Scream Queens alum did get pregnant, it was after she and the AYR president, 38, had decided to give up. “I’d had my third procedure and was down from taking these medications and healing from surgeries,” Michele explained to Schwarzenegger, 31. “I was like, ‘Let’s just stop.’ … I kept thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t meant to be for me. Maybe this isn’t going to happen.’ It’s something that for me, personally, was always my biggest fear in my entire life. It’s what I’ve wanted more than anything. Emotionally, it just started to build and build. … Then we got pregnant.”
The New York native then assumed that “everything would be fine” — but her pregnancy was “very scary with a lot of really hard stuff,” including months of bed rest.
“I started bleeding terribly, horribly,” the Brunette Ambition author revealed. “I had to tell my mom I was pregnant in the bathroom. That lasted my entire first trimester. I experienced very heavy bleeding, some which was scary to the point that we rushed in the middle of the night to the hospital. Probably every other day, we were certain that this time was definitely it. I was put on an extreme amount of medication, progesterone, to help sustain this pregnancy, and I was put on bed rest for my whole first trimester. That was just horrible, absolutely horrible.”
Michele’s pregnancy became even more “complicated” during a 20-week anatomy scan, which showed “a lot of potential red flag markers.” The pair found out “very late” that their upcoming arrival was healthy.
The Emmy nominee added that she spent many sleepless nights worrying, noting that she never let her guard down until her son was in her arms.
The little one, who was breech, arrived in August 2020 via C-section. “Everyone’s happy and healthy, and they’re extremely grateful,” a source told Us Weekly at the time. “He’s been an easy baby so far.”
Five months later, the Golden Globe nominee told Health magazine about her PCOS diagnosis. “Through diet, I have been able to manage it,” the You First author said in January. “But I am very fortunate. There are way more extreme versions of PCOS that women have a lot of difficulty with—mine is not as intense. Which is why I haven’t really talked about it, because there are women who have it so much more intense.”
