by Ginger Zee
Brad nodded. If he were a peacock, he would have fanned out his feathers and knocked me off the bed.
“You’re welcome.”
Brad and I had a great time the next two days. We both knew this might be the last time we would be on spring break together. Grown-up life was taking over, and I was going to be with Ben now. We were probably getting married. Brad cried at the airport when we said goodbye. Because that’s how all romantic comedies end. At the airport.
Six months later, Ben and I got engaged. And no, we did not take Brad along on our honeymoon.
The stage manager gave me a thirty-second warning and I lowered my head. At ten seconds, the audience detonated into a deafening applause. I heard the click, click, click, and then the announcer: “Ladies and gentleman, Dancing with the Stars continues our legendary talent contest with the delectable, the defiant…Ginger and Val!”
I looked up and started dancing on a stage in front of millions of people. Head to toe in obnoxiously awesome turquoise sequins, I was jiving in front of America. About twenty seconds in, I blacked out, and when I came to, I was in my final dance pose in Val Chmerkovskiy’s arms, feeling about as high as one can get without drugs. I was on season twenty-three of Dancing with the Stars, and although I had never done anything like this, I felt oddly at home.
My journey to being a contestant on one of the longest-running reality competitions had begun two years prior. It had been three months since I took over for Sam Champion on weekday GMA when I joined our post-Oscars GMA extravaganza live from Los Angeles. We were going to have some of the dancers from Dancing with the Stars, including Derek Hough, do a big opening number. One of our senior producers, Margo Baumgart, thought it would be fun if I danced with Derek. I was a fan of Derek’s and the show’s, and it seemed like a great way to display another side of me to the GMA audience. There was only one problem: I had never done ballroom dance before. But like everything I had said yes to in my life, I threw myself into this challenge with an enthusiastic “Absolutely!”
Derek and I danced, and it was magical. He taught me a one-minute number and essentially puppeteered me across the stage, pushing and pulling me in my gold-sequined fringe dress. I guess I did okay, because afterward, my agent and the producers began talking about the possibility of my being a contestant. It was decided that I was going to be on season twenty. There were rumors that Derek was going to be my partner, and I was stoked. This was going to take my career to another level and allow people to get to know me beyond the weather.
Two days before I was supposed to sign the paperwork for the show, a bombshell dropped. Due to some scheduling issues and other concerns, my bosses thought this was no longer a good time for me to do the show. I was furious, and I didn’t understand. I know now when they say, we were not trying to hurt you, and there may come a time that it makes sense again in the future…that they were right.
Dancing or not, I stayed plenty busy. One month later, I started hosting a new series on GMA called “Extreme Zee.” I would present a series of extreme stunts and travels for GMA, starting with dangling off the side of a Chicago skyscraper and rappelling down the side. I would go on to dive with forty sharks, bungee jump, zip-line off a platform hundreds of feet above an NFL football stadium, and fly a drone into a fissure in an Icelandic volcano.
In late winter of 2015, the GMA producers decided that they wanted me to travel to Jellyfish Lake in Palau, and I jumped at the chance. Palau is a chain of more than three hundred islands between the Philippines and Guam. It takes more than thirty hours to get there, and I would only have six days total to travel and do the piece. As detailed earlier, I had been through the travel wringer at ABC, so this was nothing, and I couldn’t wait.
As soon as I arrived, I was shuttled to our hotel. The salty ocean air rushed over me and almost made up for the brutal jet lag I was suffering from.
I immediately met my producer, Jennifer, and we boarded the boat that took us around the stunning landscape on and under the sea. Each of the sandstone islands juts up out of pristine turquoise water, covered in vibrant green mangroves and local plants, including lush flowers that I had never seen before.
We went scuba diving in what divers around the world refer to as one of the Seven Wonders of the Underwater World. On our dive we saw sharks; a plethora of fish; and perhaps my favorite animal ever, a giant aqua-colored Napoleon wrasse. It is a mammoth fish, weighing four hundred pounds, that has a face like an old man. This one followed us through the entire dive, even when our guide brought me to the edge of what looked like the Grand Canyon underwater. As I held on to a chain that was attached to the edge of the rock we were on, they warned that I needed to stay on this leash or I could get swept away in powerful ocean current. It felt like I was holding on to a pole in a hurricane, and I knew it without even seeing it: the video of this expedition was fantastic.
The second day was spent on boats for at least ten hours. We snorkeled and showcased the beauty of Palau. As I was taking my final boat to Jellyfish Lake, I started to feel a little sick. I shook it off and made some excuses. Maybe it was the jet lag, the scuba nitrogen/oxygen, the tilefish, or the wine I had had the night before. Whatever the case, I needed to fight through it, because we were now at the jewel of Palau, Jellyfish Lake. From the surface, the lake appears to be like any other, but as soon as I dove in, I saw them. At first it was just a few orange globes, but as we swam toward the middle, a few became hundreds, then thousands of nonstinging jellyfish. They swarmed around me, and it felt how I imagine taking a bath full of Jell-O would.
Jellyfish Lake was created at the end of the last ice age when a certain breed of jellyfish was trapped in this mostly saltwater lake. Over generations, thanks to a lack of predators, they evolved away from having their stinging cells. It was sublime, and it almost made me forget about how sick I was feeling.
As soon as we docked, I headed back to the airport to catch a flight back to Guam and then Tokyo. During a seven-hour layover in Tokyo, I started feeling really sick and was worried it was food poisoning. And then it hit me. I fumbled for my phone. Oh, my goodness, I was late. Not late for my flight…but late. I was pregnant. I searched around the Tokyo airport for a pregnancy test but couldn’t find anything. I waited the full seven hours in the airport, plus the thirteen-hour flight home, plus two hours in traffic from JFK, to run to the pharmacy and confirm what I already knew. Yes, I was pregnant! I couldn’t wait to tell Ben, but decided that just announcing it to him like a lunatic when he got home wasn’t good enough. Instead, I made Ben a video using the GoPro footage of my dive in Jellyfish Lake.
As thousands of jellyfish cloud the picture, I emerge in my snorkel gear. And suddenly words start scrolling from the bottom of the screen that read…Even though I wish I could have been with you, isn’t it great that your baby was in Palau? Not me…our baby. And then the test popped up on-screen reading POSITIVE.
Ben was stunned by the video. He cried at the big news, and just like that, from that moment forward we were parents.
It wasn’t too much later that Ben decided he didn’t want me to go on my next ABC adventure in Vietnam. I was going to hike into Hang Son Doong, the largest cave in the world, and do a live broadcast. This is a cave that had been discovered only a few years before and was so dangerous that only three hundred people had ever been inside. It would be my most intense, and possibly most dangerous, adventure yet.
I tried explaining to Ben that the trip had been set for months. I couldn’t not go. Ben didn’t understand that. All he saw were his most precious assets, me and the baby, deliberately throwing themselves into danger. Also, because I was pregnant, I couldn’t get my immunizations or travel shots, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to eat any of the fresh food. I was supposed to leave in just ten days and go across the world, and Ben was terrified. I assured him I would never take any risk that I felt would endanger our child, and he reluctantly helped me pack. I told the producer in charge of the segment about my pregna
ncy, and she helped make sure I would have enough packaged food to make it through the trip. By the end of our trip, I was sure I could never eat another can of soup or granola bar in my life.
I flew through Seoul, Korea, to Hanoi, Vietnam, and took another flight to Dong Hoi, where I met up with one of our most talented field producers, Bartley Price. Bart has covered everything from war in the Middle East to tornadoes with me, so Vietnam for him was just another stop on the map.
After spending the first night in Dong Hoi, we drove two hours to a small village where we were prepped for the expedition. They gave us a choice of hiking two days through the jungle, or choppering in on a huge helicopter. We chose the latter, as we knew we had a huge hike ahead of us once we got underground and wanted to reserve our energy. This helicopter had red, white, and blue paint, but when I took my seat and buckled up, a piece of the white interior chipped away. It was military green, and I realized it was really that old—you know, from the Vietnam War. The people were so kind, but with my new cargo in my uterus, I was extra cautious and filled with questions and concerns. I watched the dense jungle over rolling hills become more and more rural, and I breathed a sigh of relief as we landed safely a few miles outside the cave. We hiked through and along a river for an hour in the intense heat, and I felt okay. They warned us of bugs, tigers, monkeys…you name it. Within an hour, we had made it to the mouth of a giant cave shaped like a crescent moon. I said out loud, “Well, this isn’t so bad.” And then our guide, Howard Limbert, who was one of the first to discover Son Doong, laughed.
“Oh, no, dear, this isn’t the cave. We have days of hiking ahead of us.”
Great. We crossed under the arch, and the temperature immediately dropped from near ninety to seventy. It almost felt cold. We walked to the edge of the first drop, and hundreds of yards straight down, you could see the first base camp. We hiked down the slippery rocks, my blood pressure out of control with all the new blood for the baby in my body. My feet hit the white sand beach at the bottom, and I was so happy I had come. This is the part of my job I cherish—seeing parts of the world I would never see on my own and sharing the experience with an audience that may never get this chance. I mean, a white-sand beach inside a cave?! This was already one of the wildest places I’d ever seen, and we were only in the entrance. The guides had warned us of foot rot, so we made sure to dry our shoes and socks as much as possible that night. They warned us that the water at the base camp here was the last we would see for four days. So if we wanted to freshen up, now was the time. As I made my way into that chilly water, I was instantly transported back to Lake Michigan, where my dad used to force me to dunk myself into the sixty-degree lake to wash my hair when we were camping. That night, as everyone ate amazing Vietnamese food cooked by our guides, I poured Aquafina into a packet of dry soup and prayed that my fetus was getting the nutrients he needed.
Just as I went to take my second bite of the barely cooked soup, splat, a swallow pooped on my spoon. It wasn’t bats in this cave that tortured us, but a fast-flying bird that followed us and pooped on everything for the next seven days. It was funny and charming for about thirty minutes, and then everything we owned was covered in guano.
That night, the sound of the cave was deafening. There were swallows pooping everywhere and strange animals creeping and crawling around us, and after one forced hour of sleep (I was still on NYC time), I woke up to the fullest bladder I’ve ever felt. For any of you who have been pregnant, weren’t you surprised by how early you had the constant peeing sensation? Well, mine came to me in a tent on a borrowed one-inch-thick mat in a sleeping bag. I exited the tent with a headlamp as instructed and was rapidly swarmed by a dozen species of insects as I awkwardly walked to the compost toilet.
That’s right, I said compost toilet. We had just entered a national treasure, so of course we couldn’t just go anywhere. Instead, we shared a bucket full of rice husks that absorbed our waste. As I approached the makeshift tent over the bucket, I quickly pulled down my pants, and as I started to pee, a creature more frightening than any I have ever encountered fell from the top of the tent right between my legs. It scurried back and forth, hitting my feet, the bucket, and the edge of the tent. I muffled my scream, knowing I didn’t want to wake the thirty others from my crew and the guides who had set up camp with us. It was the biggest centipede I’ve ever seen. This thing had to have been a foot long and seven inches wide, an ugly earthling that was my first real indication that we were not in New York, or even North America, anymore. It was also the end of my using the compost toilet at night. I started using one of my food containers as my very own private toilet inside my tent. I would empty that small container into the compost toilet every morning. The combination of the smell of my own urine I was carrying back and forth with the smells that surrounded that compost toilet was just about the worst thing you can do to a nine-weeks-pregnant lady.
Yuck.
Thank goodness we moved on that day and I learned to strap a scented baby wipe under my nose. Despite the scent challenges, the hike was transformational; each step I took opened a new world that so few had ever seen. And you could feel it. New species were constantly being discovered under this giant crevasse. Physically, it was treacherous, and we had to watch every step very carefully. I was probably overly cautious, given I was pregnant and nobody else on the trip had any idea.
We made it to almost the end of Son Doong and shot some of the most epic scenes for my story. At one point, I climbed to the top of a stalagmite covered in bright green moss. With the drone camera circling around me, capturing the single beam of sunlight pouring into the cave from a hole above, it looks like a scene from Avatar. Each scene we shot was more unbelievable than the last. As we made our way back to the cave entrance, I knew we had great footage that would complement our historic live shot to come (few had braved Son Doong, and no one had taken on the task of bringing it live to the world on a broadcast). By this point it had been almost four days since we had bathed or seen the sky. We set up at the original base camp, and this time I dove into that pond with zero reservation, embracing the chill. All the video we had shot so far was transferred back to NYC using a complex series of satellites reflecting off each other up and out of the cave. Our live broadcast was thirty-six hours away. We tested several different locations for live shots and ran through rehearsals with the two awesome drone operators who had captured the aerial journey and were helping us make the live portion look even bigger and more marvelous.
After the live broadcast, I felt that same pang I had years earlier when I realized how much I loved Ben. This time, I was homesick and knew that my life was evolving, and as much as I love adventure, it was time to get home and grow this little miracle.
By the fall of 2015, as I was nearing my due date, Dancing with the Stars approached me about going on the show that spring. My bosses agreed this time, and now all I had to do was get it through my head that I was due to give birth around Christmas and that by mid-February I would start filming. Sure, sounds like a perfectly normal turn for a postpartum woman. So I said yes, because that is what I do.
My son was breech and wouldn’t budge, so we scheduled a C-section. Anyone who knows me knows that I can ride a helicopter into a jungle in Vietnam, yet an IV at a hospital is my biggest fear. I had to get one, and once that was complete, the rest was seamless. Except the part where they were already cutting into my belly and I could feel everything. (For those of you who don’t know, think of how they numb your mouth for dental work, but you still feel the pressure.) And Ben was still not in the surgery room. I was crying and asking where my husband was and kept telling myself that I needed to stay positive so my baby boy could come into this world in a light-filled room. Ben finally arrived, and when he saw that I had been crying, he made me laugh by telling me that all my ex-boyfriends were in the waiting area.
Moments later, I felt the doctor and nurse wiggle and jiggle my insides, and then I felt him get pulled out. I was overjoye
d by the first sounds of my baby boy crying. He was finally here! They held Adrian over the sheet for two seconds like in The Lion King before whisking him away to clean him up. When they brought him up to my face and put his cheek against mine for the first time, it was the most instant love I have ever felt. It haunts me how soft and perfect that little cheek was. I think about it all the time. That moment that I became a mother was the best in my life. And even now, as he is reaching for this keyboard and screaming at me for not allowing him to ruin this text, I love every screech. I cherish every tear, every laugh, and every smile. He is a constant reminder that all the sorrow, hardship, and mentally broken moments I have had are nothing. He is my purpose. Through all the relationships, the clawing my way through TV stations, this was where I was meant to be, and these were the people I was meant to be with. As soon as I touched that little face, it was gratitude that I felt. And that is really what life’s about. I just didn’t know how to express that until later that spring.
So we went home and became parents. Six weeks later, my doctor cleared me to walk around and exercise normally (I still had quite the scar). Two days after that appointment, I flew to Los Angeles and met my partner for DWTS, Valentin Chmerkovskiy.
The producers did a great job at keeping my partner a secret from me. I was still carrying a considerable amount of pregnancy weight and hardly felt like myself, but it’s amazing what becoming a mother does to your self-esteem. It makes you feel like a superhuman. I felt like I could do anything and everything, even more than I had in my past. So when I walked in and saw Val standing behind the curtain, I nearly fell to my knees. He was the last person I thought they would give me for a partner. He usually got the tough, cool chick with attitude. I was the furthest from that. I ran to him, breathing in that sweet cologne and eau de Val that always surrounds him, and gave him the biggest hug. (I was sweating like a little piggy, because I had on a leather coat over a dress over some major Spanx.)
