Tori Spelling on being 'a mom warrior'

Tori Spelling on being 'a mom warrior'

The arrival of Tori Spelling's fourth child, Finn Davey, was an exciting event, but it was even more thrilling considering that mom and baby almost didn't make it.

Spelling, 39, was diagnosed with placenta previa 20 weeks into her pregnancy, a condition that causes internal bleeding that could have been extensive enough to have led her physicians to terminate her pregnancy, Us Weekly reports.

At the time, the actress and reality star was worried about losing her son and losing her own life as well, as she held on through a 10-week hospital visit and four months of bed rest.

Spelling chose not to discuss how difficult her pregnancy was until after Finn arrived August 30, and she tells CNN that the decision was a tough one to stick to.

"The placenta previa, which is the condition that put Finn and I in the hospital that was potentially life-threatening, no one knew about that, and that was the hardest part for me," she said.

"There were many hard things about it, but a hard part of it for me was I'm so honest with everyone - that's what I love about my life and my celebrity is that I'm an open book, and I'm happy to be that way. Bad, good, I put it all out there. And I couldn't do that because medically, we didn't know what the outcome would be ... It was something I needed to keep private with my family and my close friends."

Even though she was in the hospital, Spelling maintained her blog, fooling everyone to the point that she would sometimes see photos of her with captions that said she was showing off her baby bump.

But, she told CNN, those were photos taken before she was in the hospital. With no one knowing what was really going on, "it was almost like this lie I had to keep from people, and that was really hard!"

And then, after Finn made his arrival, "I did have complications with my C-section from surgery and I had to have emergency surgery - [and] yeah, there were some not so nice things written," she said.

But while the words and headlines hurt, if anything, it's given her a tougher skin and made her even more of a "mom warrior."

"There's things you do and things you don't, like when you mess with me as a mom warrior," she said. "Everything I've been through, we're so grateful to be here, and then to have something else that actually took me out of the game from being a mom for quite some time ... and to say it was because it was elective plastic surgery, I was like, 'Uh-uh, don't mess with me as a mom.'"