Rebecca MADDERN ‘She’s my best work yet!’
As her 40th birthday loomed, Rebecca Maddern was feeling emotionally wrung out, grappling with the reality that she might never become a mother. The first female host of the Nine Network’s AFL Footy Show, Rebecca was riding a professional high but secretly struggling with IVF, sneaking off to the bathroom at work to inject herself, running to the clinic for scans and blood tests, even doing the show bloated and bandaged after a painful procedure for endometriosis – all the while joking on air with a panel of oblivious male colleagues.
“IVF was tougher than I ever imagined,” says Rebecca, now 41. “I’m a pretty tough cookie and it came close to breaking me.”
After two years of trying for a baby naturally and three rounds of IVF (“back-to-back – failed, failed, failed”), Rebecca and her cameraman husband, Trent Miller, were told their only hope was an egg donation. “I was devastated,” she says. “IVF was enough, but having an egg donor is a really big next step. I was just like, I don’t know if it’s going to happen
