Ashley Graham has revealed she almost died giving birth to her twins in January, after she suffered a “severe” hemorrage.
The 34-year-old has opened up about the traumatic birth of her twin sons Malachi and Roman in a candid essay for Glamour magazine.
She wrote: “The night I gave birth to the twins, I hemorrhaged. It was 2 a.m. when my contractions started.”
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“At 3:45 a.m. I went to the toilet thinking I needed the bathroom, and Malachi came out just as my doula was arriving, in time to bring him into the world.”
“Two hours and seven minutes later, I had Roman in my apartment bathtub—we didn’t even have enough time to blow up the home birthing tub because everything happened so fast,” she continued.
“At first we were all celebrating. We couldn’t believe that my labor lasted just three and a half hours, and I was feeling so incredibly grateful to this team of skilled, intelligent, and trained professionals around me, who were there for me when I had Isaac, and were now with me again for the twins.”
“The next thing you know, I looked at my midwife and I said, ‘I don’t feel good. I think I need to lay down,’ and I blacked out,” the model explained.
“All I can remember is feeling a light touch on my cheek, which I found out later was actually somebody smacking the crap out of my cheek, someone holding my hand, my husband Justin in my ear, praying, and someone jabbing me with a needle in my arm. And I remember seeing darkness and what seemed like stars.
“When I finally came to, I looked around and I saw everybody. They just kept saying to me, ‘You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine.’ They didn’t want to tell me, right then, that I’d lost liters of blood.”
“They didn’t want to tell me that one of the midwives had to flip me over, press her finger down right above my vagina bone to try and stop the bleeding.”
“And they didn’t want to tell me that the vein in my arm kept collapsing and they couldn’t get the needle in for the Pitocin, so they’d had to put it in my hand.”
“But even though they didn’t want to go into the details at that moment, I looked around the room, saw blood literally everywhere, and let out this deep, visceral cry—an emotional release from the chaos I had just experienced,” Ashley recalled.
“The midwives asked me if I could stand up and walk to bed. I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit up or even crawl. So they got a twin-size bed sheet, rolled me onto it, and slid me down my hall into my guest room, where I had a trundle bed that I could barely roll onto.”
“Thank goodness the twins were fine, while I lay on that bed for four straight days. I couldn’t walk for a week. And I didn’t leave my house for nearly two months.”
Ashley, who is also mother to two-year-old Isaac, revealed in her essay that she suffered a miscarriage last year before she fell pregnant with Malachi and Roman.
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She wrote: “I’ve not shared this until now, but I fell pregnant in January of 2021, on my husband’s birthday.”
“Because it was my second pregnancy, I started to show early, and we were so excited. But at the end of February, I had a miscarriage.”
The model mum said the loss was “devastating”, and wrote, “It felt like one of the biggest losses I had ever had in my life to date.”
You can read her full essay for Glamour here.
