Louise Thompson reflects on complicated birth of son Leo
Louise Thompson reflects on her difficult labour with her son Leo.
The former Made in Chelsea star welcomed her baby boy into the world in November 2021 with her partner Ryan Libbey.
After suffering complications when giving birth to Leo, Louise had to have an emergency C-section, which left her fearing for her life.
During a new interview on Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast with Giovanna Fletcher, Thompson shared details of her labour, explaining she could ‘feel shaking hands’ during the operation.
She admitted, “It’s taken me a long time to even think about how wrong it is that I was just awake throughout the whole thing. I think that that’s probably where a lot of my issues came from later on when I was recovering because it was a long operation”.
“Under what circumstances is a partner or a family member ever allowed into a heart operation, a brain operation, you know?”.
Louise went on to reveal that she ‘doesn’t know why’ she wasn’t put under general anaesthetic during the surgery.
“I’ve spoken to other women since, who have had complicated deliveries who have been put under general anaesthetic and I don’t know why I wasn’t because it’s a lot for the human brain to have to witness. You know, full cognitive functioning to see it all, to hear it all, to smell it all, to see the faces, the panicked faces around you, the clattering of feet”.
She continued, “I could feel shaking hands. I mean the whole thing. And also not to be able to run away from it because it’s obviously the human instinct to survive and everyone talks about flight or fight but rarely talk about freeze, which I guess is what I struggled with quite a lot because I couldn’t move. I couldn’t run off the operating table. I couldn't do anything to keep myself alive".
“The only thing that my head was saying was just, “Breathe and maybe in the next minute it’ll be finished’”.
Louise went on to confess, “I was turning to Ryan all the time, asking him where I was still alive because I couldn’t quite understand how this was happening to me and how I was still alive with all the chaos in the room".
Giovanna stated, "For anyone who doesn't know, essentially you were cut somewhere that you shouldn't have been cut”, to which Louise responded by saying, “Yeah. My uterus was like an elastic band or a balloon that they’d sort of ripped all around it as opposed to just cut layers in and make an incision where they pull the baby out which is just a straight line".
"Mine went all the way around and nicked something down on my lower left side and the bleeding was just non-stop”.
