On today’s episode of The Real, Tamar Braxton got candid with her fellow co-hosts and sexologist/author Dr. Nikki Goldstein about freezing her eggs and how the process made her “bat crazy” and took a toll on her body.
“I did this because…First of all, I was afraid that my kids would come out looking like ‘Old-livia’ because I was older,” she said jokingly during the segment. Braxton added, “And then my husband got sick and I just wanted to make sure, you know, that we were…we had that security behind us.”
MUST READ: Egg Freezing: Hope Over Hype
In 2012, Braxton almost lost her husband Vincent Herbert. She dedicated one of her most acclaimed performances on last season’s Dancing with the Stars to Herbert. “They tell us he has multiple blood clots in his lungs,” she said during a pre-recorded segment for DWTS about the day he was hospitalized. “Vince was induced into a coma, and the only thing I could think about was, ‘How am I going to live without the love of my life by my side?’ “
During this hospital visit the couple decided to have a baby. According to a 2013 study in the journal Fertility and Sterility, a 30-year-old woman who freezes her eggs and later thaws four of them has only about a 23 percent likely to give birth. That likelihood drops to about 15 percent for a 37-year-old woman.
Braxton became pregnant three months after that fateful hospital visit, but fertility treatments were not easy for her and came with some serious side effects. On The Real she shared, “I gained a whole bunch of weight. I didn’t know where it came from. That freaked me out, right? And then I couldn’t inject myself, I had to have somebody inject me. I couldn’t do that.”
Their son, Logan, was born June 2013.
For women debating to freeze or not freeze, the most important thing, according to Dr. Elizabeth Barbieri, a specialist in infertility at Oregon Reproductive Medicine, is to ask lots of questions before starting the process. “Given the emotional, physical, and financial investment, it’s important to be fully informed…”.
Watch Tamar Braxton on The Real in the clip above and check your local listings to catch the full episode!
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