Most millennials will know Sammi “Sweetheart” Giancola from her reality TV days on the cultural phenomenon known as Jersey Shore. Giancola appeared on the MTV hit for several seasons before bowing out. She has recently joined her former castmates on the reboot, Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, and now, she is getting real about her journey with IVF.
Giancola, 37, told Page Six’s Virtual Reali-Tea podcast that her experience with in vitro fertilization (IVF) and making the choice to give viewers a glimpse at the “very scary process” has been emotionally draining.
“I’m nervous, I am so nervous,” she said of sharing such an intimate part of her life with the world.
“I go through it on the show, but I was so nervous about the whole thing … I wasn’t sure what to film. It was just a scary process in general because it’s so personal.”
Giancola — who also suffers from endometriosis — revealed her plan to have a child with fiancé Justin May using the help of IVF in the show’s season 7B premiere.
“I feel like I’m still nervous to watch it and I’m still nervous to see what people say,” she continued, anticipating that a portion of watchers may not agree with her path to potential pregnancy.
“It’s a very vulnerable stage in my life. It still is and I’m still going through it, so I don’t know how I’m going to be watching it. And I think that’s why I was so nervous in the first place because I didn’t know if I would be able to handle it.”
Giancola kept her privacy from MTV cameras inside doctor appointments, but she did allow filming of her self-administering hormone injections and explaining to castmates about her IVF journey.
“Towards the end [of filming], I started to open up a little bit more and it was nice to get the girls’ support,” she says of co-stars Jenni “JWoww” Farley, Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, Deena Cortese and Angelina Pivarnick.
“You kind of see how it all plays out,” she added. “I’m still on this journey and I’m still going through it, and it’s a difficult journey but it’s nice to hear other’s people’s stories and … having the support there is just really, really nice.”
Before Giancola felt comfortable opening up to her castmates, she turned to social media for solidarity.
“Some people don’t believe in IVF and stuff, so I was nervous to tell anybody,” she explains. “I was leaning on other platforms like Instagram or TikTok and seeing what other people were going through.”
In the end, Giancola felt compelled to stand up and share her own story.
“By watching and learning from [social media users], I was starting to realize maybe I should talk about this,” she tells Virtual Reali-Tea.
“Or maybe I should come out and talk about this because maybe someone else can relate to me, or maybe I can help somebody else, or maybe somebody else can just share their story or their journey and just help me in some other way,” she added.
Giancola credits her fiancé Justin May for being her “rock and backbone.”
“We’re going through it together,” she says. “So we’ve had each other.”
Giancola froze her eggs at 35. In a clip from the show, she talked with castmates Snooki and Pivarnick about her struggle to envision a family as a single woman.
“It sucks to be a woman at this age,” Giancola said. “It really is terrible, it’s terrible.”
“I got my eggs frozen,” she said in the clip. “I’m over it. At 36, I truthfully thought I’d be married with kids living in some house somewhere and it’s just not where I’m at right now in my life.”
The owner of Sweetheart Coast boutique on the Ocean City boardwalk also declared, at the time of the interview, that she wasn’t in a hurry to start a family.
“I’m not rushing,” Sammi said. “I don’t want to feel that pressure to do that. I don’t want to get older at all.”
Two years later, Giancola seems ready! Wishing her nothing but good news.
