Lily Allen has spoken out about when her eldest daughter Ethel was struck down with a life threatening illness at just 12-months-old.
Little Ethel was diagnosed with laryngomalacia, a condition which causes the larynx to collapse into the airway, which means she had a lot of trouble breathing. Lily told Radio 4 listeners: “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 breastfeed her and to sit there in my chair with her and spend those precious hours into the night looking after your child.”
The treatment for baby Ethel meant she had to be fed through a tube for eight months, and Lily explains that because she suffered a still birth previously she found it really tough to cope with her daughter’s illness: “She was tiny, she'd lost so much weight and then as a result of that, because of what happened before with my previous [baby], it was just a really tough time.”
Thankfully, Ethel is totally fine now, and Lily spoke in a separate interview about how she won’t stop her children from experiencing life, even if that means taking drugs: “I can’t really do anything but be there for them. People are going to do what they want to do, quite rightly.
“They’ll say, ‘You’re a hypocrite. You went and experimented and you said it was a right laugh so what do you mean I can’t?’”
