LOUISE THOMPSON reveals what really happened during childbirth ordeal: I was ... trends now

Louise Thompson has endured a lot of trauma over the past four years.

The former Made in Chelsea star turned fitness influencer ended 2020 with a miscarriage. 

She then became pregnant again with her son Leo, undergoing an agonising labour that culminated in an emergency caesarean. 

Medics took three hours to staunch a haemorrhage, during which Thompson lost three-and-a-half litres of blood: more than three quarters of her body's volume. She later found out it was because her womb had torn.

'I heard a cry as Leo came out, but I didn't care that I had a child. I genuinely believed every second I was bleeding to death,' she says softly. 'I kept turning to [my fiancé] Ryan [Libbey, who owns a personal-training company] and asking him whether I was still alive – I didn't believe I could be. No one gave us any reassurance; it was all like some sick nightmare.'

In truth, the nightmare hadn't even begun. After five days, mother and son were discharged, only for Thompson to haemorrhage at home two days later. This time it took four hours to stop the bleeding and she lost five litres of blood, requiring several transfusions. In the aftermath she suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder that left her struggling even to look at Leo, let alone engage with him. She begged Libbey for 'a pill to end it all'.

'I didn't care if I died,' she says. 'I just wanted someone else to kill me because I didn't have the confidence to do it myself.'

Another haemorrhage followed a few months later. Meanwhile, she was suffering from the chronic bowel disease ulcerative colitis. In January this year, after months of diarrhoea requiring '18 to 20 trips to the loo' each day, crippling pain and excreting blood, she had her colon removed. 'My body just gave out. I was begging [doctors] to take it out,' she says.

The first that Thompson's 1.4 million Instagram followers knew of this was last month, when she posted an image of herself with a grey pouch attached to her stomach, commenting 'Hey, look I've got a stoma!'

For the rest of her life, Thompson, 34, will live with this bag attached to her digestive tract, collecting waste from her body. Thompson is telling me all this at the huge kitchen table in her home in upmarket Fulham, Southwest London. The room is tastefully decorated with a huge island, bright pictures on the wall and drawings by Leo – now two – on the fridge.

Through vast windows we can see her two king charles cavalier spaniels Koji and Toto barking at something in the sunny garden.

In such surroundings, with Thompson – tiny at just 5ft – perfectly groomed in a long white skirt and black jumper, chatty and smiley, it's hard to grasp how much she's been through. It's all documented in her new book Lucky: Learning to Live Again.

Indeed, Thompson's life has been a triumph of glossy appearances masking hidden pain. She was born – three years before her brother Sam, another MiC alumnus and winner of last year's I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! – in London and brought up in South Kensington, and so is aware of her 'privileged' background. She says her parents, Karen and Michael, both property developers, loved her but showed 'minimal affection'. 

They divorced when she was 11. Desperate for attention in her teens, while at boarding school Thompson began drinking and partying heavily and had a string of 'questionable' relationships.

She was a student at Edinburgh University when she was approached to appear in E4's MiC – the reality show documenting the gilded lives of those in London's most expensive borough. Thompson rejected several offers. 'I'd been quite rude and judgmental about the show, saying it was a waste of an education. But then I went through a savage breakup and decided I had nothing to lose. I was very good at taking orders, so I just did what the show's producers told me, like a puppet.'

For the next eight years she found her relationships – with the likes of the show's 'villain' Spencer Matthews, who was serially unfaithful – being played out in front of millions. Finally she quit in 2019 after becoming engaged to Libbey, her fitness-trainer boyfriend of three years, who she'd persuaded to join the MiC cast, although he had little in common with their flashy ethos. 'Ryan's very different personality-wise [from most MiC cast members]; much more low-energy in a good way – very chilled, not egotistical. He doesn't want to be famous and there's something very attractive about that.'

Together the couple set up the fitness brands Pocket Sport and Turtle, while Thompson is estimated to have made around £4 million from endorsing various brands – clothing, make-up, homewares – on her Instagram to her 1.4 million followers, most of whom were MiC fans.

She was thrilled when she became pregnant in late 2020, but at around eight weeks she miscarried. 'It was really tough. I shut myself away in a dark room for a week, grieving.' 

Thompson soon became pregnant again and, unlike many of her friends who'd used private healthcare, decided to give birth at nearby NHS Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. 

'I didn't want to spend my hard-earned money on a private birth, we were doing house renovations!' she says.

Thompson makes clear that she's not bashing the NHS. 'They are overstretched and underfunded. Huge parts are badly run but it's not the fault of the people at the coalface.' 

Yet from the off, alarm bells were ringing. Being so petite, she was certain she'd find a vaginal birth nigh-on impossible.

'I have the body of a 14-year-old boy – very narrow – while my partner's big. It just wasn't going to work.' 

The midwife at her local health centre, however, wouldn't countenance her repeated requests for a caesarean, instead suggesting Thompson have a home birth. 'She sat nodding without acting on anything I said and every time I was refused, my confidence diminished.' Her face creases at the painful memory. 'I felt I'd labelled myself as that annoying person who saw herself as too posh to push. But no one should be made to feel like I did – with no say and no control.'

Her instincts proved correct. After an agonising night in labour, it transpired that Leo's head was stuck in her pelvis and she ended up having an emergency caesarean, followed by the terrifying operation to stop her haemorrhaging. 'Everyone in the room looked very distressed, I could feel their shaky hands on my body. If they'd allowed me to have a planned c-section, things could have been very different.'

She was discharged from hospital after five days, having been told by a consultant that 'no one was around' to read a CT scan she'd undergone to investigate her persistent abdominal pains (later she discovered her womb had ripped). She arrived home, 'looking so ill: grey and swollen'.

She's certain that if someone had read that scan, she wouldn't have haemorrhaged at home two days later. 'That was much more scary than the birth. Blood was flooding out of me. I thought: "This is it." I'd survived one near-death experience. This time there'd be no coming back.'

Thompson spent three days in intensive care and nearly three weeks on a ward, immobile, hooked up to dozens of machines, undergoing endless undignified and painful procedures. While there, she contracted pneumonia and sepsis and developed bedsores. 'I bounced between debilitating anxiety about staying alive and not caring if I died,' she remembers. Meanwhile her son was being cared for at home by Libbey and the couple's families.

When Thompson was finally discharged, she found herself suffering nonstop anxiety attacks, convinced she was dying. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. 'I was in a state of perpetual fear and hyper-vigilance, unable to function for a large period of time, sitting on the sofa, completely losing my soul, my personality.'

Once, having been coaxed into visiting the local pub for lunch, Thompson started screaming that she was dying: 'I felt I was having a seizure. I couldn't see or speak –my head was just hanging down. Ryan had to carry me home like a child.'

All the time, she was uninterested in baby Leo. 'I really was not a good parent for a very long time,' she says sadly. 'For most of his first few months I couldn't have told you what he was doing or even who was looking after him. When I did see him, I would hold him at arm's length. I didn't talk or sing to him. 

'He was a trigger [for PTSD flashbacks] – I associated his cries with bleeding to death – but for ages I didn't want to accept that.' She shudders. 'Leo was always crying. Maybe it's because he felt some need wasn't being met. Looking back, it breaks my heart.'

Gradually, Thompson forced herself to interact. 'I had to fake it. I was giving it too much energy and going over the top, but the early years are so important and I really didn't want there to be lasting damage.'

They took on a night nanny for the occasional shift. Meanwhile, her relationship with Libbey was at 'the lowest of the low'. 

He struggled to carry on with his personal training business. Up until the birth, Thompson had been the family breadwinner; now they 'burned through' her savings while she was unable to earn (she stopped posting on Instagram for five weeks) while spending thousands on complementary therapies in a bid to feel better. 

'I wrote about the trauma we went through but then removed that bit from the book because it was too intense, too upsetting. We went to the worst place any relationship can go to – for a year we were living separate lives; we just didn't communicate. If he had left me I wouldn't have minded; things were so bad. I was just in survival mode and he was in hell, caring for two people and resenting me a lot for not being able to parent. No other relationship I've been in would have weathered that storm.'

With time, and a lot of therapy, their relationship has slowly healed. Thompson's bond with Leo blossomed from pretence into passionate love. But the horrors were still not over. Not long after his first birthday, she haemorrhaged again, for reasons that she's still trying to ascertain, but that may indicate some arteries still weren't working properly in her womb. This time she lost three-and-a-half litres of blood. There was another transfusion and a hospital stay, but Thompson was calmer: she knew she could heal 'from the most atrocious damage'.

I didn't talk or sing to Leo. He was a trigger – I associated his cries with me bleeding to death 

After all this, the removal of Thompson's colon – which happened after the book went to press, so isn't described in it – is something she virtually brushes off. She'd suffered from ulcerative colitis for six years, but after

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