Former Made In Chelsea star Louise Thompson has revealed in her new book how she repeatedly asked for an elective C-section but was told she was low risk
Louise Thompson has spoken out on the horrific ordeal of giving birth to son Leo – and how she thought she would die.
The former Made In Chelsea star welcomed her first child with husband-to-be Ryan Libbey in November 2021. But what should have been the happiest time for the couple almost cost Louise her life.
Speaking out about her trauma in her new book, Lucky: Learning to Live Again, the 34-year-old recounts how she could “see immense amounts of my blood splattering all over the curtain where they are cutting me open and then splashing on to the floor below” as she was rushed for an emergency C-section, after previously being refused one despite feeling she was too small at 5ft and with a 6ft 3 partner to give birth naturally.
At one point she recalls asking her fitness intructor fiancé Ryan if she was alive and thinking “at least I’m not going to die alone” as he held her hand during the procedure. At one point she thought she had actually died and was being wheeled on a trolley waiting to be put in a body bag.
Doctors eventually ordered a C-section after it was found Leo’s head was stuck in her pelvis. Unbeknown to Louise at the time this had actually tore her womb, leading to bleeding that was hard to stop and led to her losing three-and-a-half litres of blood, more than three quarters of the blood in the body.
Louise required several transfusions in the aftermath of the birth and was left with post-traumatic stress disorder, which affected her time with Leo in the months after his birth and led to her questioning whether she had what it took to carry on. She said: "I didn’t care if I died. I just wanted someone else to kill me because I didn’t have the confidence to do it myself."
In an extract from her book previewed by MailOnline, Louise – who recently revealed she now has to wear a stoma for the rest of her life after suffering several health problems since Leo’s birth – confessed that “childbirth destroyed everything that was good in my life” despite desperate longing for a baby after suffering a tragic miscarriage at eight weeks in 2020.
She revealed she felt joy after reaching the 12-week mark and knowing she would go on to carry Leo full term, but that soon turned to horror leading up to his traumatic birth. As part of her birth plan, she had requested an elective C-section after being told her baby had a very big head, but said she felt “pushed about in a system where I wasn’t being listened to” and was even advised to have a home birth as she was considered fit, healthy and low risk.
After a few weeks, Louise said she “gave up asking” for a C-section, but believes things could have been very different had she been allowed one from the beginning. She wrote: “Now I feel stupid and naive that I didn’t fight harder. My contractions started in the early hours of Leo’s due date, Sunday 14 November. I was awake most of the night, but the pain was manageable. By late afternoon the pain was increasing and by the time we’d arrived at the hospital, the contractions had shot through the roof. I’d gone from very little pain to extreme agony with no build-up in between, to the point where I was hallucinating. I was terrified.”
Once in the birthing centre, Louise said they were ushered into a room with a bed but the pain was so bad she was unable to hold a conversation. Her and Ryan were left in there for over an hour alone to “fend for themselves” and not even shown how to use the gas and air to help with the pain.
Louise asked for an epidural, but it took several people and an agonising two-and-half-hours to administer one. She recalled how nobody seemed to be in charge of what was going on around her and she repeatedly asked for a C-section, but junior doctors on duty told her to keep going with normal labour. After being left in pain overnight, at 8am the next morning, midwives established Leo’s head was stuck at an awkward position in her pelvis and he was never going to come out without surgery.
Eventually Leo was born, though he had to be resuscitated as he had stopped breathing. Louise then had to endure being awake as doctors worked on her for three hours to try to stop the bleeding until she eventually blacked out from exhaustion. She said: “The next thing I know I am being moved on a metal trolley. In my brain, I am 100 per cent sure that I’m in heaven. I am dead. The surgery has failed. It’s my dead body on this trolley, waiting to be put in a bag.”
Though she was relieved to be alive, the trauma from the birth left Louise with PTSD and although she knew her baby was going to be okay, she said: “Not that I asked about him. My brain didn’t have the capacity or the initiative to consider my child. I couldn’t make sense of what I had just witnessed and how the hell I was still alive after having been subjected to such savagery... The numbness I’d been submerged in was replaced by a heavy sadness that this was how things had turned out. I was heartbroken for both of us."
*Louise Thompson’s book Lucky: Learning to Live Again is out on May 23
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