Remember when Flavor Flav found love with Danish model/actress Brigitte Nielsen and VH1 documented their relationship on the aptly named series, Strange Love? Well, that didn’t last long, and Brigette even returned to help her ex-boo pick a new love on Flavor of Love.

Before The Shumperts we had Brigette and Flav. The year was 2005 and so much has changed since, including the fact that Brigette became a mom (again) at 54 years old! The reality star welcomed her fifth child, a daughter, Frida, on June 22 after more than 10 years of undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment. WOW.

“It is such a long road,” Brigette, now 55, tells People. “What I want women to know is that everything is possible, but you have to be realistic.”

After meeting her husband, Mattia Dessi, she started planning for their future together by freezing her eggs at age 40. “If you don’t want to use [donor] eggs, you have to preserve your own eggs at a reasonable age for there to be a possibility,” she says. “I wouldn’t even bother trying after age 42.”

The catch is there’s no guarantee it will work. Brigette’s odds of conceiving were only around three to four percent. “There is a huge disappointment,” she says of undergoing the IVF process. “If you do IVF, 80 percent of the time, it doesn’t work. It’s that phone call going, ‘It’s negative.’ It’s the waiting. It’s a lot. It’s a big, big journey.”

She adds, “Another thing is it is expensive. It doesn’t come easy or cheap if you do it my way. I want people to know that.”

We wonder what Flav thinks of his ex’s decision to use IVF? We also wonder where Flavor Flav is.