Home And Away star reveals her real-life pregnancy battle.
Home And Away star overcomes painful condition to get pregnant in real life, but on screen it’s not such a happy story. Kerry Harvey reports.
As Summer Bay’s Tori Morgan struggled with infertility, the actress who plays her, Penny McNamee, was battling morning sickness.
“I just had to suck it up and go and be sick in between scenes and come back and keep going,” says the Home And Away favourite, who is now more than halfway through her pregnancy.
“It was awful, particularly driving up to Palm Beach from Sydney which is a one-and-a-half-hour drive. Several times, I had to stop the car and be sick on the side of the road. I was terrified some paparazzi man was going to take photos of me and say I had a hangover or guess I was pregnant but it never happened.”
Although the 35-year-old actress already has a three-year-old son, Jack, with husband Matt Tocker, she has had her own battle with fertility issues, having only recently been diagnosed with endometriosis.
Her character’s problems are, however, a little different. The unlucky-in-love Tori – facing declining fertility – has decided to embark on motherhood on her own and asked friend Robbo (Jake Ryan) to help her achieve her goal.
McNamee says the fact both she and Tori were having similar experiences at the same time was purely coincidental.
“The writers spoke to me about a year ago and said this is what they were thinking of for Tori’s storyline and I thought it sounded great and that I could bring a lot to the story,” she says. “It had nothing to do with me. That was all just very fortuitous timing.”
However, McNamee is keen to do the storyline justice.
“I really wanted to accurately portray the emotional toll that infertility can take on women,” she says. “I took the role very seriously and wanted to make sure all the medical facts were accurate and in scenes where Tori could choose to be emotional or stoic I usually picked the emotional side because I think that was probably more realistic for most women going through fertility issues. “It’s been a hard storyline for me to film in a lot of ways. There were days when I found it hard and emotional and others where I just felt really proud to be able to portray accurately just how hard fertility issues can be.” McNamee discovered she was pregnant in real life in July while dressing for the annual Logie Awards. “My dress wouldn’t do up and it had done up for the three or four weeks leading up to the awards,” McNamee says, adding it took three women to zip her into her gown. “I knew I hadn’t been eating too many hamburgers – in fact I’d been eating really healthily in the lead-up to the event – but it was way too tight around my bust and stomach and I thought, ‘Oh, oh, I think something’s going on here’. “I couldn’t even go and buy a pregnancy test because the Logies didn’t finish until midnight so I had to do it the next day.”
Once she had her pregnancy confirmed, the actress says she was on cloud nine to discover the treatment she’d had for her endometriosis had been successful.
Since her diagnosis, McNamee has spoken out publicly about the disease and the impact it has on the lives of the women who suffer from it. She has no regrets about going public about what some would consider a private matter.
“I am a bit of an over-sharer in my life anyway. I’m not one who feels like I have to keep things secret,” she says.
“However, the main reason is I felt really ripped off that I had no idea that I had suffered from this disease for 20 years without realising that kind of pain wasn’t normal and that it had really affected my chances of having a family.
“I actually genuinely felt a responsibility to get the word out. Women were often taught not to speak about these things because they were considered very private and not nice to talk about.
“If other women had spoken about it, in the media or in my personal life, I may have twigged earlier that maybe what I was experiencing wasn’t normal.”
McNamee says several women have since thanked her for being so open about her experiences.
“I’m not the only person with a high profile who has spoken out about endometriosis in the last 12 months and I think that has helped opened a door for women to be able to speak openly about the pain.”
“There were days when I found it hard and emotional and others where I just felt really proud to be able to portray accurately just how hard fertility issues can be.”
– Penny McNamee