Last month, 47-year-old actress Kenya Moore announced her pregnancy during the Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Season 10 reunion show. The star of the popular reality series on the Bravo network recently revealed her experience with in vitro fertilization (IVF) to PEOPLE magazine.

Moore explained that one of the first steps in the medical procedure was taking hormones to stimulate the ovaries. The star, who is afraid of needles, had to inject herself with hormones. “I just felt blessed because I was stronger than I thought I would be,” she said.

Doctors monitored Moore before eventually extracting her eggs and fertilizing them with sperm in a lab. Next, they implanted the fertilized eggs in her uterus.

Moore said the only pain she felt was when the physicians stuck her with an IV before removing her eggs, which she attributed to having tiny veins.

“[With IVF], they specifically tell you a start date to go and take a blood test because the [pregnancy tests] you take over the counter, the pee-on-the-stick kind, don’t always show the hormone level if it’s not strong enough...so it may give you a negative when it’s actually positive,” she explained.

But Moore couldn’t wait for the test results so she decided to buy a pregnancy test at the supermarket immediately after her blood work. She took it in the store’s bathroom, and it was positive. Later that day, the doctor called to confirm that she was pregnant.

Moore said she and her husband, Marc Daly, aren’t concerned about the sex of their baby right now. “We want to be surprised, and we want to make it as natural as we can at this point,” she said. “We just want a healthy baby.”