When you become a parent one of your biggest fears is your child developing a health issue that you are not able to control. For Lily Allen that fear came true when her oldest daughter Ethel was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness that caused the larynx to collapse into the airway when she was just 12 months old.
Lily revealed the frightening situation on BBC Radio 4’S Desert Island Discs,
“It’s [the illness is] basically a problem with the throat.”
“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.”
During the treatment process, Lily recalled that Ethel needed to be fed through a tube for eight months.
“When she was really really little, the doctors said she had to have an operation to correct it and then that didn’t work so she had to have it again.
‘And 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 her little fighter is doing well now and is a big sister to Lily and husband Sam Cooper’s youngest daughter Marnie. Over the weekend the singer posted a photo of her girls at Glastonbury Music Festival saying,
“Strong Glastonbury Crew this year. Mum’s on the Pyramid at 6.30 but we’ll be in the dance tent , obvs.”
