Kim Kardashian has spoken openly about the major health complications she experienced during her pregnancies with North and Saint West, as well as her decision to have youngest children Chicago and Psalm through surrogacy. During an appearance on the podcast All's Fair with family attorney Laura Wasser, Kardashian revealed she thought she'd miscarried North (opens in new tab) in 2012, after experiencing severe pain and heavy bleeding—a fear her doctor initially confirmed.
"I thought I had a miscarriage, cause I was really heavily bleeding and in so much pain," Kardashian recalled, as E! reports. "Went in, cause you have to go and do like a D&C [dilation and curettage] to clean out your miscarriage." A doctor couldn't find a heartbeat, Kardashian said, telling her, "Oh, you had a miscarriage." Thankfully, when she returned to the doctor on Thanksgiving, North's heartbeat was detected.
Her pregnancy difficulties were far from over, however. "We ended up obviously having North, and I had a really bad pregnancy: I had preeclampsia, I delivered six weeks early, she was four pounds and I had something called placenta accreta, where the placenta grows inside your uterus," Kardashian said. "It's honestly what people die from in childbirth, so you have to get the placenta out within a certain amount of time." The doctor was forced to "cut the placenta off with his hands," she said, and the procedure "left a hole" in her uterus. "That muscle doesn't grow back," Kardashian said.
Conceiving Saint was no easier, Kardashian recalled. "After I had North, luckily I did go through the process of getting embryos and tried to get pregnant for about a year and a half, could not, and so they said I would probably not get pregnant, so I used one of the embryos and was able to get pregnant with Saint." Again, she suffered from preeclampsia and placenta accreta during her pregnancy, with both conditions "a little worse."
In December, Kardashian revealed in an Instagram video promoting shapewear brand SKIMS that she underwent major surgery after her pregnancies. "I actually had to have five different operations within a year and a half to fix the damage that all of that did inside," she said, as Today reports (opens in new tab).
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