Heavy Pregnant woman holds the letters "IVF" on her baby bump.
Though Hallmark Channel star Torrey DeVitto is thrilled she’s expecting her first baby at age 40, she says getting pregnant via in vitro fertilization (IVF) was far more challenging than she expected.
DeVitto and her fiancé, Jared LaPine, announced they were expecting via social media on May 19, 2024. During an appearance on the “Broad Ideas” podcast released two months later, on July 15, DeVitto told co-hosts Rachel Bilson and Olivia Allen that their baby, a girl, is due on November 24.
In the interview, DeVitto revealed that she got pregnant via IVF and opened up about how difficult the process was for her, including frequent blood draws, bruising, weight gain, and “outrageous” hormones. The “Chicago Med” alum, whose most recent Hallmark movie was 2023’s “Love’s Greek to Me,” also said that the “one thing” no one warned her about was how “isolating” the IVF process could be.
Torrey DeVitto Admitted She Felt Like a ‘Lab Rat’ During IVF Treatments
While appearing on the “Broad Ideas” podcast, DeVitto described some of the challenges she didn’t expect with her IVF treatments, explaining, “It’s like, you can prepare yourself for it as much as you can, but then, it’s like, the hormones were so outrageous. And then you do gain weight from it and stuff, in weird ways. Like, your pants don’t fit in weird ways … and you constantly feel like you’re in your worst moment of PMS.”
IVF is a “complex process,” according to the Cleveland Clinic, “that involves retrieving eggs from ovaries and manually combining them with sperm in a lab for fertilization.” Patients typically receive injectable hormone medications to help a group of eggs mature enough for potential fertilization. When that process is successful and an egg becomes an embryo, per the Cleveland Clinic, it is surgically placed inside a uterus with hopes it “implants itself into the uterine wall,” resulting in pregnancy.
“When you’re doing the shots, you start to … feel like a bit of a lab rat too, because you do the shots every day,” DeVitto told Bilson and Allen. “And then at one point, like, you have to go get your blood drawn every other day for, like, weeks at a time. So you’re like, constantly with bruises … and then you don’t even know if it’s gonna work.”
But for DeVitto, the physical process was not as hard as the social-emotional challenges she faced, telling Bilson and Allen that she often felt very alone at her farm in Michigan, where she moved after the pandemic — before meeting LaPine — to be closer to her mom and other family members.
“I think the one thing, though, that they don’t tell you (is) I felt like it was such an isolating experience,” DeVitto shared, admitting that it was sometimes grating when people would say they knew “exactly” what she was going through or when friends didn’t reach out to support her.
“Friends that maybe are always there weren’t reaching out the same way,” DeVitto said, explaining that very few understood how hard the process could be. “You don’t know until you’re (in it) and you can’t blame people for not knowing either. But I think I love being alone and isolated and that’s why I love the farm, but this was the first time that I was like, ‘I don’t like being totally alone right now.’ Like it felt super, super isolating.”
DeVitto said she felt very lucky that she and LaPine had success after one cycle of IVF, acknowledging that other people continue the process “for years” trying to get pregnant.
“It’s financially taxing, it’s mentally taxing, it’s a lot,” she said.
Torrey DeVitto Said She Was ‘So Sick’ During Her First Trimester
DeVitto has celebrated feeling good in recent weeks, posting via Instagram on June 10 — just after her 40th birthday — that she was feeling “healthier than ever,” and adding, “I am 40 and feel like my life is just starting and I couldn’t be more excited for it.”
But when DeVitto sat down with Bilson and Allen, she had just completed the first trimester of her pregnancy and was thankful she’d gone three days without throwing up, telling them she’d been “so sick” for weeks.
DeVitto laughed about the fact that LaPine often had to pull the car over when she got nauseous, and revealed that she’d even had a hard time on her flight to Los Angeles that morning.
“On the plane this morning, I could smell every single person and every single thing on them, and everything they ate,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “I was like, ‘This is so hard!’ I read somewhere that it’s like a superpower that I never asked for. It’s so true — it’s a horrible super power!”
DeVitto first revealed she was engaged to LaPine in September 2023, when she shared on Instagram, “Earlier this month at 5 pm on a weekday while walking the back trails at the farm, still in my PJs and goat boots, he got down on one knee, in what I hoped wasn’t poison ivy, and asked for forever. My answer was obvious. ❤️🔒”
According to Us Weekly, the couple had been dating for six months at the time of their engagement. They met when a cousin of DeVitto’s set them up, she told Bilson and Allen, and joked with them that it was like he walked right out of a Hallmark movie.
She said, “You know, he like had, like, the old re-done Jeep and the fox-red lab and, like, the flannel shirts and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’”
“It’s getting more and more Hallmark by the minute,” Allen exclaimed, to which DeVitto replied, “Totally!”