The actress is due in two months
Emmerdale actress Lucy Pargeter has today opened up about her struggles with fertility.
Speaking on This Morning to Holly Willoughby and Ore Oduba, who is filling in for Phillip Schofield today, Lucy talked about how she and her fiancé, Rudi Coleano, have struggled for 11 years to get pregnant.
Lucy, 39, gave birth to the couple's first child, Lola, 11 years ago, and their second try of IVF has proved successful, as Lucy is now pregnant with twin girls!
The Emmerdale star, who plays Chas Dingle in the soap, described how women "need to be educated" on IVF. She said: "There's a massive chunk of education that needs to be given to women about not being able to get pregnant. Getting pregnant can be, and often is as you get older, an awful lot harder.
"We went to the doctors and both got checked out. I've always had heavy, painful periods so I had a couple of laparoscopies where they look inside to see if anything's going wrong. There was a tiny bit of endometriosis, which is scarring, which they took off but that shouldn't have had any effect on fertility.
"But there was no reason, nothing. They looked at both of our stats - my egg reserves, his sperm and everything was fine, it just wasn't happening."
Lucy then revealed that she actually kept her IVF plans secret from her soap bosses. She said: "I kept it a secret from work, because that's also a problem. If you go to your employer and say, 'I'm planning IVF', then they think, 'well, in nine months time, you're going to be off', so you don't feel like you want to give them the indication that you're going to be off because it affects storylines - everything."
Holly then prompted her to explain how IVF worked. Looking directly into the camera and addressing viewers at home, Lucy said: "Don't be scared! Please! It is fine, and millions of women do it. It's hard, but you do it - you inject yourself which gets quite easy, you just get used to it.
"I went on something called quad therapy which means I carried on my injections during the first three months of pregnancy, so I had two injections a day including tablets and suppositories and all the other lovely things!"
Holly then asked Lucy whether it affected her mentally, and she said it did: "Yeah, the first round we had I found an awful lot harder - I put on a lot of weight, I had a lot of bloating, a lot of emotional... I was all over the place. And it's hard for the man too because he can feel like he's just not having anything to do with it.
"But the second time round, once we found the right clinic, it was an awful lot easier."
Lucy then got into the "nitty gritty" of IVF, explaining: "It was fine once we got going, but it was five weeks of injections, and they stimulate your ovaries to produce multiple eggs, so you're carrying around grapefruit-sized follicles inside of you, and then they harvest the eggs. That's the hardest bit - growing all the eggs.
"We had 19 that fertilised, but day-by-day some of them die or crumble, and we were left with four that got to day five which is the optimum time to put them back in."
Lucy briefly touched on her failed IVF attempts: "We put two in last year and they didn't take, so we thought that the chances were that... If just one takes, that'll be brilliant! But I kind of knew that it would be two, I just knew."
Talking about Lucy and Rudi's 11-year-old daughter Lola, Holly highlighted how the couple have kept her involved every step of the way.
Lucy said: "I think it's so important. I didn't want anything to happen behind her back. We've both been totally open with her about it - she's been to scans, the doctor's appointment when we decided how many to put in. She knew about the whole process, about how it works and that they grow them and how they turn into cells. So she's been through the whole thing with us."
Holly then said: "IVF's one of those weird ones that people don't really talk about, isn't it?"
Lucy responded: "I WISH people would talk about it more. Alex Jones did a brilliant fertility show a few months before she announced that she was pregnant, and I really want to do something in raising awareness around fertility in older women, because it's something that isn't spoken about and it should be."
We'd love to see a fertility show led by Lucy Pargeter - what a fab idea!
Have you ever had any problems with fertility? Have you been through IVF treatment? Let us know over on Facebook and Twitter.
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