Chrissy Teigen is opening up about losing her unborn child at 20 weeks.
Earlier this month, the former supermodel suffered a miscarriage of her third child with husband John Legend. They named their unborn son Jack.
theGRIO previously reported, Teigen posted a heartbreaking photo of herself in a hospital room, sitting on the edge of a bed with tears streaming down her face. In the caption, she announced that the couple’s son had died.
In an essay published this week on Medium, Teigen thanked friends, colleagues and fans for showering her with love and support during this devastating experience.
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“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 writes.
She then recalls being in the hospital maternity ward, admitting “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).”
Teigen and Legend are parents to two other children: Luna Simone, 4, and Miles Theodore, 2, both were conceived via in vitro fertilization due to Teigen’s fertility challenges.
For her third pregnancy, she was diagnosed with “partial placenta abruption,” and received blood transfusions to save her child, but ultimately “my doctor told me exactly what I knew was coming — it was time to say goodbye,” writes Teigen.. “He just wouldn’t survive this, and if it went on any longer, I might not either.”
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At Teigen’s insistence, Legend reluctantly snapped photos of his wife in the hospital after losing their child, “no matter how uncomfortable it was,” she writes.
“I explained to a very hesitant John that I needed them, and that I did NOT want to have to ever ask. That he just had to do it. He hated it. I could tell. It didn’t make sense to him at the time. But I knew I needed to know of this moment forever, the same way I needed to remember us kissing at the end of the aisle, the same way I needed to remember our tears of joy after Luna and Miles. And I absolutely knew I needed to share this story,” she explains in the Medium essay.
Teigen then made time to clap back at critics of the post-miscarriage photos that she shared on social media.
“I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos,” she writes to the haters. “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 concluded by explaining that she decided to pen the essay “because I knew for me I needed to say something before I could move on from this and return back to life, so I truly thank you for allowing me to do so.”
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