Lily Allen’s baby daughter was struck down with a life-threatening illness.
The ‘Hard Out Here’ singer feared for two-year-old Ethel’s life after she was diagnosed with laryngomalacia – a condition that causes the larynx to collapse into the airway – when she was just 12 months old.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, she explained: "It’s [the illness is] basically a problem with the throat. 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.
"I was scared of losing her the whole time, all I wanted to do was just breast-feed 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 star – who also has 16-month-old daughter Marnie with her husband Sam Cooper – admits the treatment process for Ethel didn’t run smoothly and she ended up being fed via a tube for eight months.
Lily – who suffered a stillbirth in 2010 – recalled: "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.
"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 [baby], it was just a really tough time."
However, the brunette beauty insists Ethel is "absolutely fine now".
Lily Allen’s daughter had life-threatening illness
