Louise Thompson 'couldn't really speak' after birth trauma
The star suffered serious complications after welcoming her son
What did you miss?
Louise Thompson has told how she “couldn’t really speak” after nearly dying giving birth.
The Made In Chelsea star suffered serious complications while giving birth to her son Leo-Hunter in 2021. She spent time in intensive care, while her baby was in the neonatal intensive care unit, and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
She has now opened up about her tough recovery in an interview on ITV’s Loose Women, and revealed that after her trauma she was almost non-verbal and could only communicate with other people by writing.
What, how and why?
Thompson told the panel she suffered “a lot of gross medical trauma” and that over a year she lost 12 and a half litres of blood. “I was very very unlucky… I was very sick and I came very close to dying,” she said.
“I couldn’t really speak for a period of time, I was almost non-verbal," said the star, who was joined by her partner Ryan Libbey. "I could just write, that was the only way I could communicate. Ryan had to make all of the phone calls, all of the appointments for me. He had to speak on my behalf. It was hard.”
Thompson said she has been left “scarred” by what happened, including being awake for a long operation, which she said “is just not something that people regularly have to experience”.
“It’s been a really crazy journey… I spent a chunk of time in intensive care and that’s an alien world in itself,” she went on. “There is recovering physically but then when you go home and you have to deal with the emotional and mental trauma that follows, your brain hasn’t had time to grapple with what has happened, you can’t process it, nothing prepares you for the PTSD.”
“I couldn’t function at all…the lights were on but no-one was home," said Thompson, who shared this year that she had been fitted with a stoma bag after suffering with ulcerative colitis.
"Someone had turned the dimmer switch on my entire life. I would say to Ryan, ‘I want to get better because I love you’ and I love Ryan. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel it. I wanted to die.”
'Horrendous chapter' for Louise Thompson
Libbey also opened up on the show, saying that it had been “a really horrendous chapter” for them both.
He said: “At one point in the first operation of many I was quite literally snipping the umbilical cord here, and Leo is blue and kind of misshapen and Louise is white as a sheet with quite literally blood all over the floor and sheets were up. At one point I thought I was going to go home alone, which is something that is hard to remove from your brain.”
“To witness everything that I saw and try my best to steady the ship for both Leo and Louise, incredibly difficult,” he added.
For confidential emotional support contact The Samaritans at any time by calling 116 123 or emailing jo@samaritans.org
