Singer Lily Allen has opened up about her eldest daughter Ethel, who was diagnosed with a life-threatening disease as a baby.
During an interview on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, the British recording artist revealed that her two-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a condition called laryngomalacia when she was 12 months old. According to EMedicine, laryngomalacia is a condition that causes the "larynx to collapse into the airway."
"It's basically a problem with the throat," Allen said during the interview. "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."
Allen admitted she was scared of losing her daughter and added that "all I wanted to do was just breastfeed her and to sit there in my chair with her and spend those precious hours into the night looking after your child.''
The 29-year-old mother of two also revealed that it was painful watching her daughter struggle with the disease for eight months. She revealed that the treatment process for Ethel was not effective the first time, and she eventually had to be fed through a tube.
"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," Allen continued, "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, it was just a really tough time."
Allen, who also has a 16-month-old daughter Marnie with her husband Sam Cooper, said after enduring two operations Ethel has made a full recovery and is "absolutely fine now."
