Peta Murgatroyd is opening up about her devastating pregnancy losses.
In an interview with People, Peta revealed that she suffered one miscarriage when her husband, Maks Chmerkovskiy, was trapped in Ukraine. The two share one son, 5-year-old Shai Aleksander. The Dancing With the Stars pro described going to the hospital with COVID. But it was there that she found out she had been pregnant and had lost the baby.
Peta went to the hospital when she realized she was too weak to function. "I had no strength," she explained. "I couldn't open a dishwasher. I couldn't open the fridge to feed Shai, to get him some toast.
"It got so bad that my breath was starting to be affected. It was really dramatic."
From the hospital, she called Maks and placed him on speaker phone so he could hear what the doctor was saying. "I thought he was going to reveal some really bad news. I was like, 'What's wrong?' His face dropped," she remembers. "He said, 'Did you know you were pregnant?'"
Maks, on the other end of the phone, had only heard the doctor say "pregnant" and was overjoyed. He hadn't heard the doctor say that Peta had already lost the baby.
Sadly for Peta and Maks, it wasn't the first time they had been through a miscarriage. They had suffered two previous losses, which prompted Peta to go and visit Maks in Ukraine, where Maks was judging the Ukraine version of Dancing With the Stars, in hopes of getting pregnant again.
"I was like, 'Screw it. I'm going to fly to you in Ukraine. I'm ovulating soon. Let's make it happen,'" she said.
While Peta did get pregnant, she also contracted COVID. "I felt like I was dying, but then I obviously knew what had happened," she says. "It was just all too much for my body and I couldn't do it. I couldn't believe that this was happening to me."
Maks said that being away from Peta during the entire ordeal was simply awful. "To not be there [with her] … it's crazy. It makes you feel helpless," he said.
Peta also talked about going through her first miscarriage in the bathroom of a Whole Foods. She described sobbing because she knew what was happening but couldn't stop it.
"I think the darkest part is when the person you are in love with calls you and she says that she had a miscarriage in the bathroom, that's as dark as it can get," Maks said of that time.
Peta was also dealing with some tough emotions. "I was completely embarrassed, ultimately ashamed," she said. "I didn't even know how to utter the words and have that sentence come out of my mouth: I had a miscarriage."
She says it was especially tough for her as someone who puts so much focus into her health. "But as I came to realize, that doesn't really go hand-in-hand with the reproductive system," she explained.
Just nine months later, Peta lost another pregnancy. Maks now says that going through those losses changed him. "I think that if you look around, you will find that most of your friends have had issues [trying to conceive]. I realized that this is more common and this is not being talked about."
Peta and Maks are now in the process of starting in vitro fertilization. "I don't have any other words but hope and positivity," the dancer says. "I'm crossing my fingers that this is going to work."
