Garcelle Beauvais is no stranger to transparency and with her new memoir, Love Me As I Am, releasing on April 12, the actress and talk show host sheds light on the experiences and challenges that have molded her into the woman she is today.
In a recent interview with BET, the 55-year-old mother of three revealed the pains surrounding her past struggle with fibroids and infertility while married to ex-husband Michael Nilon.
“I wanted to have a child or children with my then-husband, and I had already had a kid, so it seemed like it would be a no-brainer. But we were trying and trying, and I kept on having miscarriages,” she told the site. “We decided to go to an infertility doctor, and he saw that I had fibroids.”
She made the decision to have them removed in the hopes of boosting her chances of conceiving. However, she found herself dealing with discomfort afterward. She ended up with shooting, repetitive pains that became a great cause of concern. “I was on a set working, and I was bent over in pain. They let me go home,” she said. “A day went by, the pain went away, and I was fine. The next day, I was in pain again and went to the emergency room. They didn’t find anything, but a doctor ordered an MRI.”
Beauvais shared that the doctors made a shocking discovery caused by her fibroid removal that by being caught quickly, saved her life. “I went home but then had to go right back to the hospital because they called to say I had a bowel obstruction that could have killed me and they needed to operate.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, uterine fibroids are “noncancerous growths of the uterus that often appear during childbearing years.” Typically, fibroids can be as small and undetectable as seedlings or can become large tumors that cause pelvic or abdominal pains, heavy periods and complications during pregnancy.
While fibroids aren’t always linked to affecting a woman’s chances of getting pregnant, it is highly likely that they can can cause infertility and the loss of a pregnancy — similar to the complications that Beauvais had to navigate while trying to conceive in her marriage. “Then for IVF, I had to give myself shots every day and go to the infertility doctor every other day to check my different levels. [We tried] for five years on and off. We got pregnant and were so excited, then seven weeks later, the pregnancy went away,” she said.
But thankfully, in 2007, Beauvais received double the blessing, successfully carrying and delivering her twin boys, Jax and Jaid Nilon. “I cried, and I prayed to God. We decided to try one more time, and I got pregnant with my twin boys,” she shared.
Beauvais is the first Black woman to become a cast member on Bravo’s reality show Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and is also co-host of the daytime talk show, The Real, Beauvais has had a longstanding career in Hollywood dating back to her alluring role as Francesca “Fancy” Monroe in the hit 90s comedy The Jamie Foxx Show.
Today, Beauvais looks to use her platform and journey as a means to inspire other women to live their best lives at any age and stage. “I hope the book can bring comfort to women who have gone through a divorce at a later stage in life. The book shares a little piece of me, and hopefully, it inspires others.”