In late September, Chrissy Teigen revealed she and John Legend lost their baby due to pregnancy complications. (They’d already started calling him Jack, and their other kids, Luna and Miles, were so excited for his arrival.) Teigen has been relatively quiet on social media since first revealing the pregnancy loss, but now she’s returned online to talk about her experience.
“It feels right to begin with a thank you,” Teigen wrote in an essay for Medium, published October 27. “For weeks, our floors have been covered in flowers of kindness. Notes have flooded in and have each been read with our own teary eyes. Social media messages from strangers have consumed my days, most starting with, ‘you probably won’t read this, but…’. I can assure you, I did.”
She then talked more specifically about what happened with her third pregnancy delivery.
“At this point I had already come to terms with what would happen: I would have an epidural and be induced to deliver our 20-week-old, a boy that would have never survived in my belly (please excuse these simple terms),” she wrote. “I was previously on bedrest for over a month, just trying to get the little dude to 28 weeks, a ‘safer’ zone for the fetus. My doctors diagnosed me with partial placenta abruption. I had always had placenta problems. I had to deliver Miles a month early because his stomach wasn’t getting enough food from my placenta. But this was my first abruption. We monitored it very closely, hoping for things to heal and stop. In bed, I bled and bled, lightly but all day, changing my own diapers every couple of hours when the blood got uncomfortable to lay in.”
She continued later in the essay, “After a couple nights at the hospital, my doctor told me exactly what I knew was coming—it was time to say goodbye. He just wouldn’t survive this, and if it went on any longer, I might not either. We had tried bags and bags of blood transfusions, every single one going right through me like we hadn’t done anything at all. Late one night, I was told it would be time to let go in the morning. I cried a little at first, then went into full-blown convulsions of snot and tears, my breath not able to catch up with my own incredibly deep sadness. Even as I write this now, I can feel the pain all over again. Oxygen was placed over my nose and mouth, and that was the first picture you saw. Utter and complete sadness.”
Teigen is referring to the photos she posted to Instagram when she first revealed the pregnancy loss. She garnered some criticism online for posting them, which she addressed in her essay, as well.
“I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos,” she wrote. “How little I care that it’s something you wouldn’t have done. I lived it, I chose to do it, and more than anything, these photos aren’t for anyone but the people who have lived this or are curious enough to wonder what something like this is like. These photos are only for the people who need them. The thoughts of others do not matter to me.”
Teigen says Jack’s ashes are now in a small box, which the family will place in the soil for a tree at their new home: “the one we got with his room in mind,” she wrote.
“People say an experience like this creates a hole in your heart,” she also wrote in her piece. “A hole was certainly made, but it was filled with the love of something I loved so much. It doesn’t feel empty, this space. It feels full.”
You can read Chrissy Teigen’s full essay on Medium.