Sofia Richie Grainge has opened up about the difficulties she experienced during her pregnancy, as well as postpartum. The model just appeared on the SHE MD podcast with Dr. Thais Aliabadi (OB/GYN to the likes of Khloé Kardashian and Hailey Bieber, as well as Sofia) and women's health advocate Mary Alice Haney. During the chat, Sofia got incredibly real about some of the things she went through as part of her pregnancy.
Firstly, Sofia talked about the complications she experienced at around 32 weeks pregnant when she woke up with cramps and backache. She texted Dr. A (as Thais is known to her celeb patients), who told her to go to a specialist to make sure everything was okay.
"Thank God she said that because they hooked me up to the monitor and they were like, you're in active labor..." Sofia said. "So I went to Cedars ... and what was meant to be just a few hours of fluid actually ended up being a six night stay. After six days. I was begging... please, please let me go home. And Dr. A was like, 'You can go home, but you're on bed rest. We have to monitor you.' So that's what I did. Bed rest... but contracting. And we induced at 38 weeks. I had a fantastic delivery."
Sofia and her husband Elliot Grainge welcomed their baby girl, Eloise Samantha Grainge, in late May. But unfortunately, the star's complications didn't end there, and she ended up developing a rare postpartum condition.
"I stayed in the hospital for two days. I went home and I blew up like a balloon. Quite literally, just swelled," Sofia recalled. "I texted [Dr. A] my symptoms again. I'm like, 'I'm really tired. I really don't feel good. I'm really swollen.' I felt very ill....So she sent over her wonderful nurse and my blood pressure was 165 over 103...it was postpartum preeclampsia."
She continued: "So the hardest thing I ever had to do, I think literally was leave my daughter two days postpartum. It was horrendous. I actually hid in the closet and cried, and my poor husband was like, 'I have to get you to the hospital because Dr. A...is saying it's just not safe. It's not safe that you're home.'
"So I spent 24 hours in the hospital and it was really, really, really hard. I was on six to eight weeks of blood pressure medication, and that blood pressure medication really just takes life out of you. So I kind of felt like I had preeclampsia, the feeling, that sick feeling, for like six to eight weeks, which was really hard."
On the podcast, Sofia also opened up about the PCOS diagnosis Dr. A gave her when she was a teenager. The doctor officially diagnosed her after assessing her symptoms such as acne, mood swings, and weight fluctuation.
PCOS is a very common condition, and is thought to affect some one in 10 women in the UK, according to the NHS.
For more information about any of the medical conditions mentioned in this article, you can visit the NHS website.
