Anna Faris Opens Up About Being "In Complete Shock" During Her Son's Premature Birth

Being 35-years-old hardly qualifies someone as geriatric. But for Anna Faris, her age made her pregnancy with her son Jack a "geriatric" one, and Jack faced health complications when he was born premature in 2012. Faris outlined her experience with her pregnancy and Jack's birth in her memoir Unqualified, published Tuesday, writing that she considers herself and Chris Pratt "extremely lucky" as Jack's parents.

Faris explains that after a complication-free start to her pregnancy with Jack, her water broke when she was just 30 weeks pregnant. She was put onto bed rest at the hospital until she went into labor a week later.

"The pain was so crazy that I could barely speak," Faris wrote. After Jack's birth, he was kept in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for a month.

"For the next four weeks, I spent all day there, pumping milk for my baby until my nipples were bleeding and blistered, because it felt like the only thing I could do to help him," Faris wrote. "He was fed the milk through a tube up his nose."

Faris and Pratt also learned that Jack might have a developmental disability due to bleeding in his brain, though the doctors wouldn't know for sure until he reached 18 months of age. They eventually learned that their son's mental development was "completely on par for his age," Faris explained.

"I only half heard the words as they came out of the doctor's mouth. I was in complete shock," Faris wrote. "We held hands while the doctor spoke, and we held hands — and smiled! — as we left the hospital, because we were getting paparazzi every time we left, which, frankly, was horrible. How do you smile when you're spending your days worrying about your sub-four pound baby? But you don't really have a choice because if you're frowning, then who knows what the tabloids could say."

Faris' words cast light onto the very real problem of celebrities and privacy. It's heartbreaking to hear that she and Pratt had to put on a good face while terrified about their son's future.

"He still has a couple of physical problems — his legs have high tone and often appear stiff, so he walks on his tiptoes a lot. He wears glasses and has to wear an eye patch for 20 minutes a day to strengthen his vision," Faris wrote of Jack. "But given that these are the biggest challenges, we count ourselves extremely lucky."