Reality star Kate Gosselin opened up about how her body changed after giving birth to sextuplets.
Sharing a post that detailed her pregnancy and birth journey via TikTok on Tuesday, September 9, Kate, 50, filmed herself talking about two “lasting effects” she noticed after welcoming six of her children at once in 2004.
“My bladder has never been right. I can’t exactly explain it or put my finger on it, but it just is very different,” Kate, who rose to fame alongside ex-husband Jon Gosselin on the 2019 TLC reality series Jon & Kate Plus 8, told her followers. She also noted that her doctor found “pieces of placenta left in [her],” which led to a course of antibiotics to ensure no infection presented itself.
Kate and Jon, 48, tied the knot in 1999 and were married for 10 years before their December 2009 split. The exes share eight children: twin daughters Mady and Cara, 24, and sextuplets Alexis, Hannah, Aaden, Collin, Leah and Joel, 21.
In her Tuesday TikTok video, Kate detailed how the two effects came about after her sextuplet pregnancy put her in the hospital when she reached 20 weeks. (Kate remained hospitalized for “10 weeks … until they were born,” she told fans.)
“When I was pregnant with them, my stomach was squished up here,” Kate recalled, pointing to her bra line. “My bladder was squished way down … compressed the whole time from baby weight, compressed, compressed, compressed. When I had my C-section, obviously they put a catheter in, [a] long-term indwelling catheter, and … all day I could not pee. I had this pain that kept growing and growing. I was nauseous, my stomach hurt, it just kept getting worse and worse.” (MedlinePlus describes an indwelling catheter as a tube inside your body “that drains urine from your bladder into a bag outside your body.”)
After Kate’s doctor arranged for her to receive a “straight catheter,” she “filled [it] one and a half times” due to her bladder being compressed to the point of dysfunction. “It, like, lost its ability to do what a bladder is supposed to do, it’s a muscle. It lost its elasticity,” Kate explained.
She then detailed the second effect, which was only discovered several days after she was discharged from the hospital. “Probably TMI to be honest but … I was having, like, really weird, awful pains and a chunk of something came out,” Kate said in the video. She noted that she “kept it” and sent it to her doctor who requested that she pop in right away. Upon investigation, Kate discovered the placenta.
“He put me on antibiotics, and after that, I was fine, but he went in and dug around,” she recalled.
She also noted several short-term effects as her body recovered at home. “I had low muscle tone, I could only walk like an old lady really for a long time,” Kate said. “I had the up-and-down, hideous scar, you know, like the jowls of a dog … that I had a tummy tuck to get rid of.”
Remarkably, no other long-term effects were recorded. “Nothing that sticks out in my mind, really, which is quite amazing,” Kate reflected.
The reality star’s post was shared less than one week after she revealed through another TikTok video that her sextuplets were originally joined by a seventh baby who was lost during pregnancy.
