Through Miracles Of IVF, Former SportsCenter Anchor Walsh Welcomes Twin Boys

Sports reporter and ex-ESPN anchor Sara Walsh decided to make her struggle with IVF and pregnancy loss public. She commented on social media just how difficult one broadcast a year was for her: “For as long as I can remember I hosted SportsCenter on Mother's Day, and the last couple years doing that have been personally brutal. An hours-long reminder of everything that had gone wrong.”

She says the problems began when she traveled to Alabama to host a live ESPN show: “I arrived in Tuscaloosa almost three months pregnant. I wouldn't return the same way.”

Walsh started to have a miscarriage right in the middle of a live broadcast. Even in this chaotic scene with loud football fans, she felt she had to hide the pain she was going through: “The juxtaposition of college kids going nuts behind our set, while I was losing a baby on it, was surreal. I was scared, nobody knew I was pregnant, so I did the show while having a miscarriage. On television.”

In the next few years, Walsh would have two more miscarriages.
Eventually, Walsh and her husband made the call to try IVF treatments, leading to more procedures, drugs, and waiting.
Finally, they did get some good news from the doctors. The physicians were able to “salvage” two of her eggs, and they seemed completely healthy.

Walsh said: “I refused to even use them for a long time, because I couldn't bear the idea of all hope being gone. I blew off pregnancy tests, scared to know if it worked.”

The IVF procedure was a success, and Walsh became pregnant with twins. That said, she did not want to announce her pregnancy publicly given everything she’d been through the last few years.
Walsh said she decided to hide her pregnancy and told only told close family members she was expecting.

She notes: “I spent a third straight football season pregnant, strategically picking out clothes and standing at certain angles, using scripts to hide my stomach. There would be no baby announcement, no shower, we didn't buy a single thing in preparation for the babies, because I wasn't sure they'd show up. We told very few people we were pregnant, and almost no one there were two.”

In fact, Walsh waited to announce the birth of her healthy twins Hutton and Brees Buschmann until a few days after they were born. The best news of all was that Walsh enjoyed a quiet day at home with her twin boys on Mother’s Day this year.

Source: IJR
Photo: Sarah Walsh/Instagram