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'I WAS TERRIFIED'
Amanda Holden opens up about agony of son Theo’s stillbirth — but says he’ll always be part of the family
TV star Amanda Holden says her stillborn son Theo is still part of the family seven years after losing him.
In a heartbreaking interview to mark the 70th birthday of the NHS, the Britain’s Got Talent judge relived her trauma.
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It happened just a year after she miscarried another baby.
Amanda, 47, said: “I just remember hearing this woman just screaming and screaming and then it was actually — it was me, I realised it was me that was screaming.
“It was the most surreal, out-of-body experience and I was actually calling my daughter’s name because I was just terrified about what to tell Lexi at the time.”
Reflecting on her last moments with her son, she recalled: “He looked so normal and so peaceful.
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“I held him in my arms and I said goodbye, basically.
“But I couldn’t have done it without the incredible team around us. My husband was so strong and so amazing but they got him through it too.
“And then the days and months afterwards, the same team of people checked on us every single day and it’s not because I’m off the telly or famous or anything like that.
“I believe they’d have ext- ended that care to any woman, any family, in my situation.”
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Amanda got hitched to record producer Chris Hughes in 2008 after a failed marriage to comedian Les Dennis, 64.
She and Chris have daughters Lexi, 12 — who accompanied her mum to the TV Baftas earlier this month — and six-year-old Hollie.
“I’ll literally do anything for the National Health Service because they got me through it, they got Chris through it and I now thankfully have two healthy girls and a little boy who is still part of the family but just not here.”
In an interview with ITV’s flagship current affairs programme Tonight, to be screened this evening at 7.30, she admitted: “It was horrific in the months after Theo.
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“My husband was frightened of having another child, he never wanted to see me go through that pain again — and himself.
“But I knew in order to carry on and live life, I had to have a baby and I was lucky enough to have the choice and be able to have another one.”
In 2011, when Amanda got pregnant with Hollie she could not contain her excitement.
At the time she said: “I never dreamt it would happen so quickly, so we both decided that we would try not to think about it until I reached the 12-week mark.
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“Now that we have and I know that everything’s fine — you have no idea how many scans I’ve had — I feel like we can really enjoy it.” But behind her smiles she carried on fearing the worst.
In the Tonight interview she revealed: “I’d be on the phone saying, ‘My baby’s not going to die, is it? This baby’s not going to die?’”
Amanda gave birth to Hollie in January 2012 but needed emergency surgery to stop heavy bleeding following complications.
She said: “They delivered Hollie and we heard her cry. Chris was like, ‘She’s beautiful, she’s amazing’.
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Then all of a sudden, my husband said he looked down and he was ankle deep in my blood.” In a Sun on Sunday interview afterwards, Amanda told how her heart stopped for 40 seconds during the nightmare ordeal.
She said: “I was moments from death. As much blood as they were putting into me was going out.
“It just would not clot. I lost about 13 to 15 litres of it all in all. “For seven minutes Chris didn’t know if I was alive or dead. They literally ran out of my blood group in London.
“They had them on mopeds coming from everywhere with it.”
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She slipped into a coma for three days at the Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London and awoke to a “tender” nurse brushing her hair.
Amanda said: “I looked like death and I just remember silently crying because she was trying to brush the knots out of my hair.
“I literally sat there just there and, you know, just sobbing that someone was that tender, that loving, towards a complete stranger.”
Amanda previously revealed her booze battle after suffering a miscarriage in 2010 at 16 weeks, two weeks before the Britain’s Got Talent live finals.
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MOST READ IN BIZARRE
In her 2013 autobiography No Holding Back, she said: “To this day, anyone watching the 2010 series of Britain’s Got Talent — won by Spellbound — wouldn’t know anything was wrong, except perhaps that I may have cried a few more tears than usual.
“Inside though I was a wreck. At Easter, when I was 16 weeks pregnant, I had miscarried a baby — a little boy — and my grief was overwhelming. I was drinking. A lot. Aware that I was almost 40, I desperately didn’t want Lexi to be an only child.
“For me, having another child was a priority.
“But nothing could have prepared me for the sadness — and very nearly the tragedy — that lay ahead.”
- The NHS Saved My Life is on ITV at 7.30pm Thursday.
Isolation adds to trauma
By Deidre Sanders, Agony Aunt
LOSING a child is the most painful of bereavements and a grieving parent can feel very alone with their loss.
Bereaved people often tell me they see friends and neighbours cross the street to avoid them — not because they don’t care but because they worry about saying the wrong thing.
The isolation can feel even worse after a miscarriage or stillbirth because those who haven’t experienced such a loss imagine it hurts less than the death of an older child. That the grieving parent can “move on” and soon have a new baby.
But the loss of a baby before or just at full-term is every bit as painful. The grieving process lasts years as parents imagine how their offspring would have matured had they survived.
If this has happened to someone close to you, be there for them, ask how they are feeling.
They can also find understanding support through and
Amanda Holden wells up on Britain’s Got Talent as she listens to NHS choir who ‘saved her life’
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