Jillian Harris shared the story of her son's birth on her blog and she didn't hold back on the details.
Harris, who has appeared on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, included a picture of her family, new son included, from her hospital room. The picture got a lot of people talking: In it, Harris is just wearing postpartum underwear.
In her blog post about the birth, she is just as honest as her hospital-room picture. For a person who has lived through a lot of made-for-TV reality, the true story of her son’s birth was about as unscripted as it gets.
To start off, Harris didn’t know for sure that her water had broken. She told her husband that she thought it had, but she wasn’t confident. “Which was really confusing, because (sorry for the graphic details) but it was more of a slow, slow leak and the doctor told us only 10% of women’s waters actually break,” she writes. In the movies, it is always an instant and identifiable flash flood of fluid.
Complicating matters was the fact that Harris works in Vancouver, but lives (on the weekends, at least) in Kelowna, BC, which is about a four-hour drive away. She had a doctor in Vancouver, but had only just met her hometown delivery doctor days before.
After a visit to the hospital and a check-in with her doctors, she went to work on her latest design-show project (luckily, it was in Kelowna), putting in long hours filming. She even went for a sunset swim. Her best friend, Sam, was staying over and bunked with Harris, who had another leak. This time, she didn’t think it was her water breaking.
“At some point in my head, I had decided that my vagina was some monstrous vacuum and I told Sam, 'You know what, this is probably from the swim in the lake, I just sucked up a bunch of water,'" she writes, "and [I] crawled back into bed."
However, it was the real deal — and the big "sploosh," as she calls it, came. So she, her partner, a group of friends, and eventually, an entire camera crew descended on the hospital.
She talks openly about her experience with contractions, an epidural, and her episiotomy on the blog, only holding back on some of the most intimate details. In true reality-TV fashion, the camera crew followed her into the hospital and documented the birth for the new family and for fans. Harris shares many of the photos and videos on her blog.
When push came to push, so to speak, the birth story for Harris was less reality and more real. She captures that spirit and those surprises for her fans and for her new family. Harris sums it up best herself: "Our birth story was nothing like we expected, but now looking back, it is everything that we wanted it to be."
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