‘Greenleaf’ star Deborah Joy Winans recently shared her pregnancy news with Essence. The actress,37, and husband, Terrence William, are excited to be expecting a baby boy, but Winans wanted people to know the health challenges (fibroids) she has experienced along the way.
“I’m super excited. I think it took me, I think week 17. I just was prepared in my mind for a miscarriage. And so, I didn’t really allow myself to kind of get attached,” she says. “And then week 17, I went to my high risk doctor and he did a sonogram and I saw his face and I was like, ‘Oh, I got to meet him!'”
Winans and her husband found out she was pregnant while she was on the set of filming an OWN holiday movie Sisterly Christmas. Before that time, she dealt with fibroids (eight) and one the “size of a watermelon having grown for what’s estimated at eight years. A procedure similar to a Cesarean was recommended, but Winans opted out after seeking a second opinion.
“I was in so much pain. I didn’t even understand what was happening. I could barely get out of bed,” she says. “The pain would hit so hard and I would have to crawl to the bathroom, literally crawl. I was in tears.”
“I had all of the basic things like throwing up, feeling nauseous that you would have in your first trimester on top of my fibroids degenerating and just causing the absolute worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life and still trying to do this movie and get home,” she says.
Winans, who feels much better, looks forward to her upcoming baby shower. She is also happy that her story can help “other women, (especially black women) to be informed to make sure their doctors are paying attention to their needs.”
“I don’t want anybody to have to go through that,” she adds. “And if I can make them aware of what I am going through, what I’ve been through and different ways to sort of combat that, then I want to do that because we’re all we got.”
On the arrival of her bundle of joy, Winans already knows he’s special. “I’m like, ‘Son, I don’t know who you are, but you’re a miracle,'” she says. “‘I don’t know what you are meant to do or who you’ve been called to be in this world, but you are going to do something great because you are fighting your way through this pregnancy.'”
Photo Credit: Elton Anderson
