Kristen Doute is reflecting on her journey to parenthood.
Before announcing her current pregnancy exclusively with PEOPLE in November 2024, The Valley star, 42, revealed in November 2023 that she had experienced a miscarriage at six weeks.
On the most recent episode of the Infertile AF: Infertility and Modern Family Building podcast, Doute recalled how she discovered she was having a miscarriage while she and her fiancé Luke Broderick were out of town.
"I woke up in the morning and I started bleeding," Doute told podcast host Ali Prato. "There was a little bit of tissue that had passed. It wasn't anything crazy, but it was enough to scare me. We were nowhere near my doctor — really, we were nowhere near any doctor."
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The reality star said she and Broderick were driving back to California when they decided to stop at a lab to get some tests done by her doctor.
"When my labs came back, my progesterone was just nothing — something else I knew nothing about. I didn't even know what hCG (Human chorionic gonadotropin) meant, I just knew it meant I'm pregnant or I'm not pregnant," she said.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, in females, progesterone "supports menstruation and helps maintain the early stages of a pregnancy. Too little progesterone can cause complications with pregnancy."
The Cleveland Clinic describes hCG as the hormone "produced by the placenta during pregnancy" that "helps thicken a person’s uterine lining to support a growing embryo and tells the body to stop menstruation."
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Doute said that she was given progesterone, but at that point her levels were too low to the point "it's not happening."
The Vanderpump Rules alum said that about four weeks after she first began bleeding, she took medication "to induce the miscarriage" after her doctor said there was no fetal pole (embryo).
"I remember asking my doctor, 'Why? What happened?' And he's like, 'This is just one of those things where there is no answer to the why,' " said Doute, who said she felt guilty and "terrible" for herself and her fiancé.
"Just trying to deal with the fact that there is no f------ answer to this. And that's the hardest part," she said, adding that she constantly tried to figure out what she could have done to prevent it.
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Doute admitted the experience affected her when she found out she was pregnant again.
"It was hard to feel happy. I was happy, but I didn't react the way I thought I was gonna react. I didn't react the same way I reacted the first time we found out we were pregnant, where that was like a rom-com movie reaction," she said, noting that the feelings of "nervousness" didn't go away until she was four to five months pregnant.
In November, she revealed that she doesn't know the sex of her baby, however, her fellow Vanderpump Rules alum Brittany Cartwright does, and is "good at hiding it." Doute and Broderick's baby is due in June.