Gretchen Rossi is pregnant, expecting first child with Slade Smiley after 4-yr IVF journey

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YES the News is true!!!!!!!!!!!!!??We are beyond ecstatic to finally announce that we are expecting a little bundle of joy!!!!!! ❤️ Our hearts are so full right now!! It was one of the happiest days of my life when we received the incredible news that I was pregnant!!! It has been the hardest secret in the world to keep ? I was bursting at the seams to tell you all! And actually many of you were already guessing and saying I was glowing like I was preggo! Well you were right! So we are thrilled to finally be able to share the good news with everyone! ________________________________________________________Thank you to our incredible doctor @drmarksurrey and the whole @scrcivf staff for helping make our dreams of starting a family come true! You guys were truly the best and we feel beyond blessed to have had you help us in our journey!!!! It has been a very arduous long four years of trying with plenty of heartache along the way but we remained hopeful and faithful, and thankfully God answered our prayers! Thank you Lord for teaching us it truly is all in your perfect timing and for teaching us the difficult lesson of just letting go and letting God!! ————————————————————————We could not have gotten through this journey alone without some dear friends and family, and that includes all of my social media family on here! Your stories, your prayers, your encouragement, truly kept us going! So thank you! We more then appreciate your loyalty and love for all these years. Your words of wisdom and guidance as we navigated through this difficult journey meant so very much!! We are a story of hope and perseverance! Don’t give up! Sending love to all those going through the struggle to conceive, you are not alone, you are heard, and you are loved ❤️ God is Good! Believe in Miracles! We feel soooo blessed to have this amazing Christmas Miracle ourselves!!! We just keep pinching ourselves! ?? #10weeks #GodisGood #IVF #grateful #IVFJourney #miracles #Christmas (Thank you to @people for this exclusive story, swipe left ??. Or read the full story by swiping up in my stories)

A post shared by Gretchen Christine Rossi (@gretchenrossi) on Dec 17, 2018 at 6:30pm PST

As mentioned above, the pregnancy comes after a very long and difficult road for the couple — a road that they have been very open about as they welcomed their fans along for the very bumpy ride.

The first major bump came at the very beginning. Roughly four years ago, the couple decided to go ahead with in vitro fertilization, and they were able to produce 14 viable embryos. Less than seven hours prior to implantation, the doctor called “saying that all of the embryos had arrested and basically died.”

From People:

“We were just beyond devastated. I couldn’t even get out of bed because you just go from such a high thinking within the next 24 hours you were going to be pregnant to losing everything and losing 14 embryos. That was really, really hard for me and Slade to come out of that,” Rossi says.

“I was in a deep depression after that. I’ve never really suffered through that or been in that circumstance before. We all get sad at times, but I really went into a depression and I couldn’t even think about or talk about IVF or trying to get pregnant again because physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually, it just breaks you.”

Slade would then undergo a vasectomy reversal, but after 18 months of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, the two decided to once again give IVF a go.

“I was scared,” Gretchen admits. “I was a 40-year-old woman going back in to try IVF. We went through two more rounds of IVF and we did not have the same amount of eggs and the same amount of embryos as we did the first round four years earlier. It was scary to sit there and think, ‘Oh my gosh, I retrieved 10 eggs.’ But out of 10 eggs, you only got one good embryo — one genetically sound embryo. And then the second round, the same thing happened. We only got two genetically sound embryos out of all of our rounds, so it was very nerve-racking going into this implantation because it was like, you only get two shots at this.”

Those two shots were enough as they received the good news the following month.

Congratulations to Gretchen and Slade! And kudos to them for sharing their fertility journey and bringing more awareness to an issue that millions of men and women are currently struggling with.

Here is a look back at their multiple appearances on The Doctors over the years, followed by their joyful announcement:

Asa Hawks is a writer and editor for Starcasm. You can contact Asa via Twitter, Facebook, or email at starcasmtips(at)yahoo.com