‘RHOP’ Alum Nneka Ihim Reveals ‘Bittersweet’ Pregnancy News

After two years of trying to conceive, The Real Housewives of Potomac alum Nneka Ihim is pregnant. The one season housewife revealed the news in an exclusive with PEOPLE. Ihim’s fertility struggles were chronicled in Season 8 of the Bravo reality series. 

“It’s so exciting,” Nneka gushes of the baby, due in May. “I’ve always wanted to be a mom and for so long, it felt like the vision of having the family I desired wasn’t possible. But now my dreams of building a family are coming true, and it just feels so special. I sometimes still have to pinch myself, it’s so surreal and shocking,” she adds. “Even now I’m trying to plan my baby shower and I’m just like, ‘Wow, this is really happening for me.’ “

Her IVF journey was documented briefly on the show. After finally getting her dream of motherhood fulfilled, the former attorney admits however this pregnancy is “bittersweet.” She first learned she was expecting twins after implanting two embryos, a boy and a girl, during a third round of IVF. At the eight week mark, she learned she lost one of the twins. 

“We showed up for an appointment and one of the twins no longer had a heartbeat,” Ihim recalls, getting emotional. “So that was really, really hard. I mean, the second I walked out of my doctor’s office, I burst into tears.”

She recalls dealing with the trauma of the moment, recalling her emotional torture in the days that followed. “I wasn’t really eating, wasn’t drinking, wasn’t doing what I needed to do to care for the one that I still had. Because to me, it just felt like I wasn’t pregnant anymore,” she explained. “I saw both heartbeats on the screen, that was the pregnancy. It felt incomplete once the other one was gone.”

“There’s trauma within the celebration,” Ihim added. “But at the same time, we’ve been through this for so long and God has finally blessed us with this pregnancy, so we’re trying to be very optimistic here. My doctor says the one we have now is very healthy and very strong. I’m more than halfway through, so at this point, I feel much more stable. After losing the twin, it’d be very easy to sit here every day like, ‘Is there a heartbeat? Is everything going to be okay?’ But I just have to have faith that’s not going to happen.”