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In her new memoir Unqualified, Anna Faris has opened up about her son, Jack’s premature birth.
The actress – who recently separated from husband Chris Pratt – said she and Chris were told Jack, now five, “could be developmentally disabled” after she gave birth to him two months early.
“By the time I was thirty weeks in [to the pregnancy], I was feeling lucky,” she recalled. “Sure, I had restless legs and backaches, but I was active and my regular ultrasounds were all good, and compared to the horror stores I’d heard from some friends I was having an easy time.”
“Then, on the morning of August 10 – when I was thirty weeks and one day – I woke up at two fifteen to a massive gush,” she wrote. “The bed was soaked, and even though I felt the fluid coming out of my vagina, I smelled it to make sure it wasn’t pee.”
“I was completely unprepared for anything dramatic like that to happen,” Faris continued. “I called my OB’s office, and I’ll never forget the way the on-call doctor said, very calmly, ‘Sooooo, you need to go to Cedars-Cinai. Right now.’”
“Even after that phone call, it never really occurred to me that Jack was coming,” she admitted. “I thought, I’ll go to the hospital, then maybe I’ll be home in a few hours. I know that sounds stupid, it was stupid, but I was in denial.”
Following the birth, Anna said: “The pediatric neurosurgeon sat Chris and me down to tell us that Jack had some severe brain bleeding and there was a chance that he could be developmentally disabled,” Faris recalled in a passage from “Unqualified” published in People. “I was in complete shock … So Chris and I did what we could, which was hold hands and hope and face it together.”
Jack was born weighing just under 1.5kgs and spent his irst few weeks of life in the NICU (neonatal intensive-care unit).
Thankfully, Jack has grown up to be a healthy, happy little boy.
“Today, he’s a happy five-year-old full of wonder and mischief,” Faris reported. “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 twenty minutes a day to strengthen his vision. But given that these are the biggest challenges, we count ourselves as extremely lucky.”
