Getty Images/Dave J Hogan
British pop star Lily Allen fought back tears in a radio interview as she recalled the pain of dealing with her newborn daughter’s health problems.
The Smile hitmaker, who performed at Britain’s Glastonbury Festival on Friday (27Jun14), battled her emotions as she recounted how scared she was about losing her little girl Ethel to a throat condition shortly after she was born in November, 2011.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday (29Jun14), Allen struggled to talk and kept sniffling as she spoke about Ethel’s struggle to eat and breathe.
Allen says, “She was working so hard to breathe, to just exist really, and she wasn’t really gaining any weight at all. Because all of the food she was taking on, she was just expending the energy on this breathing process. I was scared of losing her the whole time, all I wanted to do was just breast-feed her and to sit there in my chair with her and spend those precious hours into the night looking after your child.”
“I just remember the doctor saying when they first diagnosed her with the condition they said, ‘It’s a one in a hundred chance that you are going to have to operate’, and then of course she needed the operation and then they said ‘It’s a one in a hundred chance that they will have to operate again’ and I just thought how many one in a hundred chances do I have?”
Ethel, now aged two, was tube-fed for eight months and underwent two operations. Allen and her husband Sam Cooper also have 17-month-old daughter named Marnie.
