The doctors treating Rosanna Davison after her 15th miscarriage must have thought she was having some sort of emotional breakdown.
Frankly, no one reading her medical notes would have blamed her.
The former Miss World, and daughter of singer Chris de Burgh, had been brought into the Dublin hospital in 2020 after her husband found her collapsed in the bathroom.
She didn't realise what was happening at the time, but she had miscarried yet again.
Today, she remembers that her reaction — after doctors told her that she had been pregnant, but no longer was — stunned everyone. 'I was almost laughing. I'd had no idea I was pregnant, but they told me I'd made it to almost 11 weeks.
The doctors treating Rosanna Davison after her 15th miscarriage must have thought she was having some sort of emotional breakdown. Frankly, no one reading her medical notes would have blamed her
'The nurses were telling me about counselling services, but I was saying to them: 'This is incredible. I've never made it this far into a pregnancy.' I don't think it was the usual sort of reaction from a woman who was miscarrying. I couldn't believe my body could do this. Yes, I'd lost this baby, which was very sad, but to have got so far . . .
'I remember calling my husband, Wes, and saying: 'You'll never believe this.' '
Just the day before, Rosanna had been on a TV chat show in Ireland to talk about a very private matter. Three months earlier, having concluded she would never carry a baby herself, after a heartbreaking 14 miscarriages, she had become a mother via a surrogate.
In a delivery room in Kiev, she had cut the cord after her daughter, Sophia (who is biologically Rosanna's and Wes's) was born.
That was supposed to be the couple's 'happy ending', the conclusion of their extraordinarily difficult fertility struggle — one which, Rosanna admits today, had brought her to the brink.
And yet just as she had been weeping publicly about how it felt to be, effectively, a poster girl for infertility, here was her body giving her the unexpected message that perhaps this was not the end.
'As I left the hospital, reassuring them I didn't need counselling because I was going home to my three-month-old baby, they told me to be careful because I would be very fertile after a miscarriage.'
She smiles. 'And then another miracle happened.'
What word other than 'miracle' can you use, when you consider that Rosanna, 37, is now a devoted mother of three?
Identical twins Oscar and Hugo, conceived naturally and carried against all the odds by Rosanna, were born in November 2020.
What word other than 'miracle' can you use, when you consider that Rosanna, 37, is now a devoted mother of three?
Needless to say, her pregnancy was very stressful. She admits spending much of it simply waiting to miscarry, 'because that was my norm'.
There is no medical explanation as to why she didn't, but the upshot is all her dreams have been realised. 'We still don't quite know why, or how, but we are now a family of five. I feel so blessed,' she says.
Obviously with three children under the age of two, she is exhausted, but happily so. We meet at a Dublin hotel to talk about a book Rosanna has written about her extraordinary fertility 'journey'. It's a roller coaster of a read, surreal in parts where the various moments of her life story converge.
Take the chapter set in Kiev, where she travels to have her eggs collected for the surrogacy. She recalls visiting the city before, to judge the Miss Ukraine contest with Paris Hilton and Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Indeed, there was a vast contrast between her celebrity on-show life and the private reality. The first of her distressing early miscarriages occurred while she was still modelling, all the while being interviewed about her seemingly perfect life.
'I would be asked about starting a family and I'd try to brush it all off,' she says. 'Then I'd worry people would think: 'Isn't she selfish, putting off starting a family so she can swan around travelling?' '
She quietly slipped out of the public eye to do a Masters degree in nutrition — a decision partly inspired by her own research (she was convinced a diet low in sugar and processed foods would boost her chances of staying pregnant), but partly because she wanted to avoid being asked about her family plans.
Her father, she says, was also facing jovial questions in interviews — 'Is your daughter going to make you a grandfather soon?' — when behind closed doors, he was deeply distressed for Rosanna.
'Dad was always supportive, but he found it very difficult to deal with my sadness. I am his little girl, and this was something he couldn't fix.'
Rosanne Davison is pictured above with her father Chris De Burgh and mother Diane
Rosanna admits she regarded her body — so outwardly perfect — as 'broken', and felt a 'failure as a woman'. Her battle to have children became all-consuming and nearly cost her her marriage.
'I told my husband to find someone else,' she says. 'I knew having children was so important to him, and we knew the problem was with me.'
He insisted he would stay put and told her: 'Rosie, we can still have a lovely life.' But she couldn't see a happy future without babies.
One of three children herself — she has two younger brothers, Michael and
