Jennie Garth Opens Up About “Really Hard” IVF Journey, Reveals Double Hip Replacement Surgery

Jennie Garth has revealed she underwent hip replacement surgery and is opening up for the first time about her difficult experience with in vitro fertilization with husband Dave Abrams.

In a video interview accompanying her Self magazine cover story, the Beverly Hills, 90210 alum speaks about her experience trying IVF before her and Abrams’ brief split in 2018. “Before we broke up, we had been undergoing IVF treatments and trying to have a baby and it kept failing,” she revealed. “And that was really, really hard on both of us individually and on our relationship.”

Garth continued, “When we decided to let go of that possibility [of having children together], it sort of freed us up to love each other in a different way.”

Garth has three children with ex-husband Peter Facinelli.

In the magazine, Garth goes into depth about undergoing hip replacement surgery, saying she “lived in pain for a very long time.”

Though Garth said she initially tried to ignore the signs that something was wrong with her hips, figuring it was caused by years of horseback riding and dancing in her youth, the complications got “progressively worse,” becoming “so painful at one point that [she] couldn’t even go on a walk with [her] dogs.”

Her doctor found that she had osteoarthritis in her thumbs, knees and hips. Years later, at 48, Garth felt that her “quality of life was diminishing” with the severe pain. That’s when she went to a new doctor, who found that her left hip joint “wasn’t fitting right in its socket, and the tissue in the surrounding area was deteriorating.” He suggested hip replacement surgery. Wanting to return to normalcy, the actress asked her doctor “for the earliest opening possible.”

While she was unable to get surgery immediately, as this coincided with the height of the pandemic, she eventually was able to get her left hip replaced. Following the surgery, Garth immediately was able to return to activities she had left behind for years, such as basic household chores. “In the few years following that surgery, I felt like Bionic Woman—there was nothing I couldn’t do,” she said.

The actress then explained that though her doctors felt that her left hip was in worse shape than her right one, which is why she underwent surgery for that side, she began to feel discomfort this year in her right hip. “When they took a look to see what was going on, they realized it had somehow gotten worse than my left hip ever was,” Garth recalled. “I felt excruciating pain with every step — I’d be unable to get down on the ground or get back up. Given the success of my brand-new hip, I knew it was a no-brainer: I needed to get the other joint operated on.”

She shared that she underwent the second surgery in March, which “went well, but it took a lot longer to heal.”