Peta Murgatroyd opens up about 3 miscarriages

Former "Dancing with the Stars" ballroom professional Peta Murgatroyd has revealed she and her husband, fellow "DWTS" dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, have suffered three miscarriages over the past two years.

"I'm somebody who prides herself on health [and] wellness," two-time "DWTS" champion Murgatroyd, 35, told People magazine in a story published Tuesday. "I exercise every single day. But as I came to realize, that doesn't really go hand-in-hand with the reproductive system." She and fellow "DWTS" champ Chmerkovskiy, 41, who held their wedding ceremony at Oheka Castle in Huntington in 2017, already are the parents of 5-year-old son Shai.

The most recent miscarriage occurred in October, the New Zealand-born Murgatroyd said. Unaware she was pregnant, and having tested positive for COVID-19 days earlier, she found herself with "no strength. I couldn't open a dishwasher. I couldn't open the fridge to feed Shai, to get him some toast," she said, adding, "It got so bad that my breath[ing] was starting to be affected."

Taken by ambulance to a hospital, she phoned Chmerkovskiy, who was then in his native Ukraine as a judge on that country's edition of "World of Dance" before Russia's invasion. Together they heard the doctor ask Murgatroyd, "Did you know you were pregnant?" — with an initially jubilant Chmerkovskiy only belatedly realizing, she said, that the question was in past tense.

"I ultimately had no idea," Murgatroyd said, having attributed some bleeding two days earlier to her period. But not having known proved to be "better for my recovery because I didn't have that super joyous moment of, 'I'm pregnant again!' … I just had the moment of, 'You lost it.' "

She had suffered her first miscarriage in autumn 2020 at a Whole Foods supermarket. "I was sitting in the bathroom sobbing. I'm surprised nobody walked in because I was crying so heavily and wailing, one of those deep cries," Murgatroyd recalled. "That was something that will probably live with me for the rest of my life, being on that toilet by myself, knowing what was happening and not being able to stop it." The second miscarriage occurred nine months later.

The couple is now beginning to undergo in vitro fertilization. "I don't have any other words but hope and positivity," Murgatroyd said. "I'm crossing my fingers that this is going to work."