No Holding Back

by Amanda Holden

  Pippa had just got a job as Director of Midwifery, which meant working with incredible people, including a placenta accreta expert at Queen Charlotte’s in Hammersmith and after due consideration I moved my pregnancy over to her. It felt like it was all meant to be, and that the entire chain of events had led me to this point. The loss of my first baby had helped me with my stillbirth, and doing the midwifery TV show had helped me with both events. Everything happens for a reason, and every disappointment prepares you for something you have yet to face. I’ve learnt always to try to find lessons in what life throws at me.

  With these new developments, I was told I’d have to have a Caesarean – which was fine by me! I met the expert obstetrician Dr Sailesh Kumar – I called him ‘Slash’ because he was due to give me a C-section – and fell a little bit in love. He smelled gorgeous (Hermes aftershave, ladies!). A scan confirmed the placenta was stuck, so Slash examined me, I had something called a VQ scan, and he told me that it was actually stuck in three places. I was immediately worried about the effects of radiation on the baby until I found out it was less than you’d get on a plane. My bump and I had been on a few of those together, so I felt a bit better! Everyone reassured me the birth would be well-prepared for and that my baby was perfect.

  By January 2012 I was about to burst, but on the judging panel for Britain’s Got Talent. Simon was back, and not too alarmed by the sight of me with a swollen tummy. The previous series had ended on a rather flat note, and when Michael’s tour commitments prevented him returning, Simon shook things up by introducing four judges. When it was announced that we would have two new judges – the divine Alesha Dixon and lovely David Walliams – I was firstly just anxious about how the logistics would work. There had been so much publicity surrounding Kelly Brook that ‘Four judges don’t work’ had practically become a Britain’s Got Talent mantra – and now we were being told the opposite!

  But the first day I cannot tell you how happy I was to meet them. It felt right and I felt total relief. I’m not sure why, but I suppose it meant I could sit back and relax and enjoy the show more – rather than try and run it, which I had done the previous year with David and Michael. I knew David Walliams would be funny, but I worried his humour was pretty near the knuckle for a family show (Little Britain is an acquired taste and not to everyone’s liking). But having swum and drunk most of the Thames for Sport Relief he was also now considered a national treasure, and he turned out to be hysterical. He gave the show the reinvention it needed. His ability to push but not topple over the edge with innuendos really works and he has famously, of course, brought out the smutty, funny side to Simon that I have known about for years but which, until now, Simon has never let the world see. David also has a soft, thoughtful side – he is someone you could go to and chat about anything. Although he loves a name-drop (don’t we all!), he is not at all intimidating to speak to. I am really fond of him.

  I wanted to meet Alesha before we started the show so I arranged to meet her and her manager Malcolm in the Wolesely for breakfast. We had a good old chat about the show and life in general but I was there because I was very anxious to point out that the press would, without doubt, try and spin it so that we were enemies. I wanted to let them know I would publicly condemn any negative articles or questioning. I didn’t want any part of it, because I am a girl’s girl. Not only that, I now have two baby girls and I want them to grow up with nothing but positivity about other females in their life. There is no way their mama is going to be perceived as a bitch just for ratings.

  Even though I had expected it, I was relieved when they openly said the same thing. Poor Alesha has had to deal with so much similar nonsense after replacing Arlene Philips on Strictly Come Dancing, and has told me some hideous stories about the stuff that has been written about her. There is so much negativity in this business, but I refuse to be part of it all. I find it utterly depressing how many female celebrities are damning and bitchy about other girls, and how much also comes from female journalists, who seem to want to fuel it all rather than join the sisterhood and promote women. It’s a tough business for all of us.

  So there we were, Alesha and I, sisters-in-arms over our scrambled eggs and coffee. I was just in awe of how bloody pretty she is – striking to say the least! She also has the softest skin in the world, but then when she opens her gob it belies her beauty. Sarah Parish once said of me, ‘face of an angel, mouth of a trucker!’, and I would say the same of my fellow judge. Alesha is such a good person – down to earth, on the money, fun, very sweet and very thoughtful. Her beauty lies beneath, and it shines through. I am aware this all sounds a bit gushy but I love working with another woman who not only likes women but is actively pro-women. I have never felt intimidated or threatened by her. How can anyone even begin to compare us? We are on the show for completely different reasons, and she is eight years younger than me, for a start! We both laugh about it and try not to look at any publicity describing our ‘fashion wars’.

  During Britain’s Got Talent, I had another scan which revealed the baby weighed 6 lb, so Slash asked if I wanted her early. I told him I’d have to work out the dates and would book in for two or three weeks’ time. I didn’t tell a soul other than Chris and Jane, my make-up artist about the potential problems. My pregnancy was healthy – it was always the delivery we had to worry about. Privately, we picked the date to have my baby – Monday 23 January – three days after Lexi’s birthday, ironically the same date we picked for Lexi before she came early. I instructed Alison to release the news on the Wednesday when I was safely back at home. We wanted it to be secret until then.

  It all seemed very straightforward. But in the early hours before the due date, Chris found me in Lexi’s bedroom, looking at Lexi fast asleep. I was quietly crying. Silently, uncontrollably weeping.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ I said. (My gut instinct was kicking in again.)

  ‘You won’t,’ he said, folding me into his arms. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mandy.’

  I tried to tell myself he was right and that I was being overdramatic. But then I felt a sudden tug of emotion at not having seen Mum and Dad for so long. I made him promise that if anything happened, he’d get in touch with them. (I had no idea how prophetic that would prove to be.)

  When I arrived at the hospital the next day, my midwife Jackie was waiting and told me that she’d sneaked a jug of margarita mix into the fridge for me as she knew I’d been craving one for my entire pregnancy (now, that’s what I call a girlfriend!). More importantly, the medical staff assured me they also had pints and pints of my blood. They wired me up for every eventuality and Dr Kumar told me, ‘If anything happens or if you bleed out in the worst-case scenario, we’ll put you under and get the baby out,’ but they kept repeating the phrase ‘worst case scenario’. It felt relaxed and under control, but I was still nervous as they began the C-section, and I needed Chris to stay right where I could see him at all times whilst I tried hard not to think about the last time I’d been in this situation. Mercifully, all went well, and adorable little Hollie Rose Hughes was born. As they showed me all 6 lb 1 oz of her, I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. She cried and I cried, with joy and gratitude and relief – it seemed so wonderful and unreal after what had happened before.

  But just as Pippa was checking the baby over – she was fine apart from a little fluid in her lungs – I suddenly felt myself draining away and I gave a little sigh. Dr Kumar very calmly came straight up to where I could see him and told me, ‘Amanda, you’re bleeding quite heavily so we are going to put you under now, okay?’ I looked up at him and across at Pippa and said, ‘Don’t let me die!’ That’s the last thing I remember.

  Chris said later he could feel liquid splashing about at his feet and thought someone had kicked over a bucket of water. When he looked down he realised he was standing in pools of my blood. Within about 10 seconds my head shrank to half its size – as if the life had been suc
ked from it. I looked like a corpse, and in that moment, he thought I had gone. Unbeknown to everyone, and not in the VQ scan, my placenta had attached itself to my bladder, and when they lifted it out, it snagged a large artery and ruptured it. I had haemorrhaged and was bleeding to death.

  They bundled Chris out of the operating theatre and he stood the other side of the door, holding Hollie and watching helplessly for a full seven minutes, not knowing if I was alive or dead. As I lay unconscious they couldn’t get blood into me fast enough – as much blood as they were putting into me was going out. It just would not clot. Dr Kumar was packing my stomach with wadding to soak up what I was losing, using what they call ‘trauma medicine’ learnt specifically at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province (thank God for the experience doctors get on the front line). All of a sudden, my heart stopped beating. For forty seconds I flatlined.

  Pippa smashed my chest with her fist and my heart started beating again. At one point there were more than thirty medical staff trying to save my life as Chris stood outside watching them running in to cope with the trauma, fearing the worst. They eventually stemmed the bleeding but left me open and unstitched in case it happened again.

  Just as Pippa came out to see Chris and tell him I was going to be okay, the emergency buzzers went off and it started happening all over again. She and Chris watched a whole new emergency trolley being wheeled in, and when Pippa followed it she found me bleeding once more. They had to put some sort of balloon inside me which they filled with air to put pressure on the torn artery, but my blood still wouldn’t clot and the doctors weren’t sure I was going to survive. They had emergency motorbikes arriving at the hospital bringing extra blood for me and I had 15 litres in three transfusions as they practically threw it into me. (I always knew how important it was to give blood but until something like this happens you don’t take on board how vital it is.) But when they realised that wasn’t working, as a last resort to clot my blood they tried using vials of ‘Factor 7’ man-made blood (so I guess I’ve definitely got the X Factor!). But in the end, that is what saved me. Fake blood. They had to operate then and I almost lost my bladder but they managed to save it, thank God, or I’d have had a ‘Prada handbag’ for life, as my midwife joked later. Hollie was looked after in Neonatal as a precaution but was doing well.

  Poor Chris – he had me critically ill in one room and Hollie on another floor of the hospital. He says he felt numb. Apparently it made him feel like one of those guys on The Big Reunion who talk like they’ve just come back from Vietnam. ‘Yeah, I just felt numb.’ Except this, of course, was a bit more serious.

  Nine hours after they’d first started operating, they finally stitched me up and took me to the high dependency unit, where I remained in a coma under general anaesthetic for another three days. The doctors told Chris they didn’t know if any of my organs might pack up because of the blood loss, and they had no idea how my heart might react. I was wired up to a ventilator but Chris didn’t trust the machines, so he insisted on staying with me in case anything happened, and he grilled every doctor who came in to see me.

  Jackie, Natalie and Pippa were there too, and helped him enormously. Pippa especially kept it very unemotional and straight, which is what he needed, and whenever he asked her to tell him the truth she did. He sat by my bedside in a chair for three days and barely slept – he was so exhausted that he actually temporarily lost the hearing in both ears, though he reckons it was down to all the beeping in the room! The doctor said it was stress that caused hearing loss. The nurses were worried about him and eventually persuaded him to go home and sleep. He reluctantly agreed and left at about 1 a.m. He left his mobile on, of course, and at about 5 a.m. it rang. It was the hospital.

  ‘Mr Hughes?’

  His heart was in his mouth. Immediately, he was thinking the worst. Why else would they have called so soon? ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is the ICU at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital.’

  By now he was well in the zone. Why were they taking so long to tell him? It had to be bad news. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s about Amanda.’

  (You can imagine.) ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just to let you know, she’s awake, and asking for you . . .’

  Finally, it sank in that the receptionist just had an unfortunately long-drawn-out manner and they weren’t ringing to tell him that I had died. He says now that all he could think of was how he would tell Lexi.

  Heart still pounding, adrenaline coursing round his body again, he dressed and rushed to the hospital, only to be told by the doctors that what was actually happening was that they were gently bringing me out of the coma they’d put me into. I was semi-conscious at one point, and had asked for him, but had gone back under by the time he arrived. He got there at 6 a.m. and embarked on his second bedside vigil. Just to rub in that it was his fourth sleepless night on the trot, it was 3 p.m. that afternoon before I woke up again!

  I was really groggy and confused, but when I became more fully aware I thought it was the same day as the birth. I couldn’t move my legs, and was scared I was paralysed. They were enormous and I had big hands like the prosthetic ones I wore as Princess Fiona in Shrek. My whole body was swollen with fluid and was three times its normal size. I couldn’t sit up or breathe easily, I had a hacking cough with fluid on my lungs and was in excruciating pain. I was also heavily sedated on morphine, but just about conscious. However, the drugs made me feel like I was being tricked. I became aggressive – which is apparently a side effect of morphine – and paranoid and thought everyone was playing around with the time. I got annoyed with Pippa and told her to stop clicking around in her heels.

  The nurse fed me a few mouthfuls of Complan and then the doctor came in and asked, ‘Did she eat anything?’ and the nurse said no.

  I said, ‘She’s lying!’ I was hideous.

  Chris tried feeding me Complan too and I spat it out and told him, ‘That is effing bollocks!’

  I was still under the spell of morphia when I heard a man on the ward shouting, ‘No! No! No!’ and then an animalistic cry. I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. I thought someone had died having a baby and got very upset. I found out later that someone had died in intensive care. His shouts will haunt me for ever.

  I kept asking, ‘Where am I?’

  Eventually, I came to enough to understand exactly where I was, and was finally able to take in everything that Chris was telling me. Almost. He kept saying, ‘Do you know what happened? Do you know you almost died?’ I could hardly believe it. (I joke that when I died I saw God and it was Simon Cowell. In truth, I don’t remember what happened. There was no white light or anything, just a void.) As I was coming out of my coma, the TV was on and I apparently began to shake my shoulders in time to the music of Deal or No Deal. Dancing in bed! Chris said he knew I was going to be alright when he saw that.

  Once Chris knew I was going to make it, he finally called my mum and dad. He said, ‘Judith, this is Chris. I want you to keep your mouth closed and don’t interrupt.’ (He wasn’t being rude – my mum is terrible for not listening and talking over everyone else!) He said, ‘I have to speak to you. I have to tell you something. It’s about Amanda.’ For the first time ever, she did listen (miracles were coming thick and fast that week), and she listened as he told her how they’d nearly lost me. Finally, she broke down, thanked him for letting her know, and asked if she could come and see me. Chris told her I’d been asking for her, and then she dropped the real bombshell. ‘Debbie is staying with us at the moment – can she come too?’ It was over six years since we’d spoken, but Chris said yes without hesitation.

  When I was awake and more compos mentis my desperation to see Hollie was overwhelming. I was just so weak. I couldn’t sit up – I could barely hold myself together. I also couldn’t wait to see my Lexi. Knowing how close I had come to never seeing her again is something that makes me want to be physically sick every time I think of it. Again, she had been protected. She knew she had a lovely ba
by sister but she also knew Mama was poorly and a lot of blood had fallen out of her!

  She was coming to visit, but I was adamant that I didn’t want her to see me in a hospital gown lying down in a hospital bed. The nurse looking after me was incredible (the NHS has nothing but my praise and gratitude). She and another nurse helped me get up out of bed and into a chair, since my legs were so swollen that I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t even put them together, so I sat there like an old man, legs akimbo! I was totally helpless as she tenderly brushed my matted hair, helped me wash my face and changed me into black PJs. She set about hiding the wires and IV lines that were coming out of my body. And we used make-up to try and cover two puncture marks on my neck from IV lines that were black with dried blood – I looked like I had been bitten by a vampire. I told them I was ready.

  My heart ached for Hollie, and finally I was told she was on her way down from the baby ward. The door of my room was kept open so I could see her coming from my chair, and I waited anxiously, butterflies in my tummy with every bump of a trolley and every footstep, my arms aching to be filled up with baby. But as it turned out, the first footsteps I heard running up the corridor were those of my lovely Lexi.

  She stopped in the doorway, slightly overwhelmed with the sight that greeted her. Shyly she came up to her mummy, Chris behind her and she gently hugged me before immediately asking, ‘What’s that on your neck, Mama?’

  ‘Daddy did a bad neck attack,’ I said with a smile. (Her daddy pins her to the floor and snuffles her neck with his stubble to shrieks of laughter on a regular basis.)

  Then quietly, and without warning, my parents and sister walked into the room. My parents were emotional as they hugged me but best of all (and I mean this sincerely), my little sister walked over and silently hugged me, her voluminous hair soaking up my tears of joy. It had been such a stupid, ridiculous situation between us and yet it dissipated in seconds. Neither of us spoke at that moment. We didn’t have to.