Emmy Rossum refused to go to hospital when she went into labour until the New York Knicks had finished playing.
The Shameless actress, who has daughter May, five, and a three-year-old son with husband Sam Esmail, has reflected on the first time she gave birth, and how she didn't want to leave the house until she'd watched the end of the basketball.
She told the Call Her Daddy podcast: “What was in the front of my psyche, was I was not going to go into labour until after the Knicks game.
“I was labouring over a large kind of exercise ball in full labour, as I’m watching the Knicks game, and in this photo, my mom is next to me on the couch, being like, ‘I really think you should just like go get the epidural,’ and I was like, ‘Nope, I’m gonna watch this game, and I’ll go when I’m fully dilated.’ ”
Emmy, 39, was initially "very much in denial" of the signs she had gone into labour.
She explained: "I remember, I like gave my husband a haircut, I was cleaning the house, I ordered some Thai food, and I had some contractions, but I was kind of like, ‘it’s probably fine.’”
Meanwhile, given her family's history, Emmy was "definitely scared of childbirth" at the time.
She added: "My mother’s mother had died in childbirth, so that narrative was very in the back of my head, or my psyche somewhere."
Emmy also reflected on her years-long fertility journey, having been diagnosed with PCOS, which has recently been renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS).
She recalled: “Postpartum anxiety for me was very, very rough, like very intense, intrusive thoughts.
“And I had had a kind of crazy journey to get pregnant, where I have [PMOS], so I had very debilitating ovarian cysts throughout my 20s, and tried to get pregnant naturally.
"It didn’t happen. Tried IUI, didn’t happen, and then tried IVF, and it happened in a big way.”
Emmy had just one egg retrieval cycle, and she was amazed by the results.
She explained: "I only did one harvest, but a kind of side effect of [PMOS] is that you can kind of become a super responder, so they woke me up from the harvest and said that I had 72 eggs, which was trippy and bizarre."
Emmy added: "It had been a long journey to get to meet my daughter, and then when I finally had it was also towards the end of Covid, so I had been able to keep the pregnancy private the whole time."
