When Mina Starsiak Hawk began trying for her second baby, it never even crossed her mind that there could be a problem.
In August 2018, the Good Bones star and her husband Steve Hawk welcomed their first child, a son named Jack Richard. “I got pregnant almost immediately after getting off birth control,” Starsiak Hawk tells PEOPLE for this week’s issue, out Friday. “It was super easy.”
Having her second would prove to be a much different story. After trying for months with no success, Starsiak Hawk saw a fertility specialist and underwent an AMH (Anti-Müllerian hormone) test, which can help assess a woman’s ovarian reserve, or egg count.
While the average AMH range for a woman of her age (35) is from 1.5 to 4 ng/mL, hers was just 0.25. The news left her devastated — but she wasn’t ready to give up. After going through fertility treatments including a failed round of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a doctor then told Starsiak Hawk she had a 1 percent chance of conceiving.
“It’s shocking to hear that,” she says. “All of a sudden your dream could be over.”
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Mina Starsiak Is Pregnant! HGTV Star Expecting Second Child After Emotional Infertility Struggles
Still reeling, they asked the doctor how they conceived Jack so easily. “He pointed his finger in the air and said, ‘It was a miracle. It shouldn’t have happened,’ ” recalls Starsiak Hawk, who broke down in tears on the drive home.
“I’ve planned my whole life around this,” she tells PEOPLE. “The floor plan of my house has two kids’ rooms and a playroom. We’re supposed to be a big family. I wasn’t just mourning the loss of a child but this whole dream.”
Starsiak Hawk and her husband, 38, decided to get a second opinion. On Jan. 2, she met with Dr. Robert Colver, a fertility specialist in Carmel, Indiana. And the initial assessment of her labs wasn’t promising.
Mina Starsiak Embraces “Positivity” as She Reveals First IVF Round Failed: “Embryo Was No Good”
Too late into her cycle to start a new round of IVF, Starsiak Hawk didn’t want to wait, so Colver suggested a natural (non-medicated) IUI, which stands for intrauterine insemination.
“It’s a fancy word for the turkey-baster method, and I didn’t expect it to work,” admits the HGTV star.
But a few weeks later, she took a test — and it was positive. “There were so many happy tears,” Starsiak Hawk says. “We are incredibly lucky.”
Starsiak Hawk shares her full story in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
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