Behind her celebrity spats and knicker-flashing performances, popstar Lily Allen has been hiding a secret agony.\nThe outspoken singer has opened up about the pain of watching her daughter Ethel, now two, battle a life-threatening condition, which meant she had to be tube-fed for eight months.
\nA year after Ethel was born in November 2011, she was diagnosed with a condition called laryngomalacia, leaving her struggling to breathe and eat.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s basically a problem with the throat. She was working so hard to breathe, to just exist really, and she wasn\u2019t 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,\u201d the 29-year-old singer said on Radio 4\u2019s Desert Island Discs
\n\u201cI 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.\u201d
\nThe Sheezus singer – who married Sam Cooper in 2011 – spoke about the agonising pain of watching her child suffer.
\n\u201cWhen she was really, really little the doctors said she had to have an operation to correct it and then that didn\u2019t work so she had to have it again. And she was tiny, she\u2019d lost so much weight and then as a result of that, because of what happened before with my previous, it was just a really tough time,\u201d Lily confessed.
\n\u201cI just remember the doctor saying when they first diagnosed her with the condition they said, it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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?\u201d
\nThankfully, after being tube-fed for eight months and enduring two operations, Lily said that Ethel is \u201cabsolutely fine now.\u201d The Fear singer burst on to the music scene in 2006 with her cheeky track Smile and found huge success with her albums Alright, Still and It\u2019s Not Me, It\u2019s You. In 2009, she took a break from music but stormed back in 2014 with her third album Sheezus.
\nDuring the interview, the star also spoke about the devastating stillbirth she endured in 2010, six months into her pregnancy. \u201cI remember when we lost our first, I remember thinking it\u2019s just so bizarre that I seem to have all these really unique experiences you know, the highs along with the lows. From playing on the main stage at Glastonbury to 70,000 people to losing a child, it\u2019s just, everything seemed to be extremes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"