Just a few months ago, professional wrestler Brandi Rhodes revealed that she’s pregnant, but her fertility journey hasn’t been without its challenges. A recent polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) diagnosis—and one particularly large ovarian cyst—have made this experience a little extra complicated for her.
Rhodes, 37, found out she has PCOS a little less than a year ago, she tells SELF. The hormone-related condition can lead to ovarian cysts, irregular periods, and physical changes such as acne. Getting the diagnosis was “a little bit scary,” the AEW wrestler says, but it did help her understand some previously unexplained symptoms.
“I’ve been an athlete all my life—I was a figure skater since the age of four and did it competitively for 17 years—and I told my doctor there was a large period of time where I didn’t have a menstrual cycle,” Rhodes says. Her doctor explained that, although people might assume that skipping periods simply has to do with athleticism, it’s often a sign of an underlying health issue. “It probably meant that I had PCOS all the time and I just didn’t know,” Rhodes says.
Knowing that PCOS can sometimes make it more challenging to become pregnant, Rhodes says her doctor prescribed progesterone, a hormone that can help maintain a pregnancy early on. She also underwent a fallopian tube recanalization procedure, which involves putting dye into the tubes to look for possible blockages that could affect fertility and, sometimes, actually clearing those blockages out, Stanford Health Care explains. “I got pregnant right after that,” Rhodes says, which was only about six weeks after getting her PCOS diagnosis.
Before that, Rhodes says she and her husband, fellow pro wrestler Cody Rhodes, had been trying to get pregnant…but not really. “When a lot of couples say they’re trying, they’re being really diligent, they’re looking at a calendar, they’re taking everything moment by moment and really paying attention,” she says. But Rhodes jokingly refers to her approach as “crotchety.” Although she had fertility tracking apps, she never quite understood what exactly all that tracking was for. “That frustrated me,” she says, but speaking with her doctor—and getting that PCOS diagnosis—helped put things into perspective and made her get serious about trying.
“It happened so quickly it was shocking,” says Rhodes, who is due in July. “I had things going on in the wrestling world that had to come to a screeching halt.” For the first few weeks of her pregnancy, Rhodes was out of the ring healing from a supposed injury. But in reality, she was dealing with intense morning sickness and an ovarian cyst that was bigger than her ovary. Rhodes “had to lie and hide it” until she was ready to go public with a pregnancy announcement, she says.
That’s one reason why the pandemic has actually made her pregnancy a little easier. “It keeps a lot of the invasiveness of others away from you,” she says. Due to the morning sickness, “it would have been very hard to get together with friends and family and entertain and have all these happy moments because I was feeling really terrible,” she says. So the pandemic “gave me that privacy to get used to everything and start feeling better.”
Now, Rhodes is looking forward to the launch of Rhodes to the Top, a new reality series starring the couple that gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse at their professional and family life—including her pregnancy journey. In fact, they were filming the pilot episode the moment she found out she was pregnant. “We filmed that moment very authentically, it was really cool,” she says. “I’m excited for the rest of the journey to come.”
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