PERRIE Edwards has revealed she battled a rare health condition as a child – and it shockingly took SEVEN years before doctors diagnosed it.
The Little Mix singer, 32, said she was born with an oesophagus condition, which meant she struggled to eat solid foods.
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An oesophagus is also known as a food pipe. It is a muscular tube that carries food from the throat to the stomach and is a crucial part of the digestive system.
Perrie said she spent the first seven years of her life “projectile vomiting” after meals, saying: ” I was severely undernourished. I couldn’t eat a thing.”
The songstress said: “Basically, when I was born, I had something wrong with my oesophagus, and that’s obviously your food tube, where food goes down.
“Every time my mum would feed me milk or whatever, I would just projectile vomit the milk back out.
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“And my mum was like, ‘Something’s obviously not right. This isn’t normal.’
“So she took me to the doctor’s. Nobody could find anything wrong with me.
“They were like, ‘Maybe she’s just a sick baby, it’s the way she is.'”
Perrie said it got so bad that she was unable to eat whole foods and had to have every meal blended.
The Forget About Us hitmaker said she was “skin and bone” by the time a diagnosis was made.
“I was probably seven when they discovered there was actually something seriously wrong, but I was severely undernourished,” she said on the We Need To Talk podcast.
“I couldn’t eat a thing, couldn’t keep food down.
“My mum had to blend my food for years, like Sunday dinners were in the blender. Soup, mash, all that kind of thing.”
“And she went to doctor after doctor after doctor.
“The doctors were like, ‘If you didn’t persevere with your daughter, this would have been it.’
“I had nothing left to give. I was just skin and bone, it was wild.”
During the same interview, the singer revealed that she had two miscarriages.
Perrie, 32, who now has son Axel with footballer fiance Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, said she had discovered she was pregnant again “not even a year” after his August 2021 birth.
She recalled: “I was rehearsing for the last Little Mix tour, and I thought, ‘I don’t feel good’. Every symptom under the sun. I was like, ‘I think I’m pregnant’.”
But as her pregnancy progressed past the five-month mark, Perrie began to suspect that medics had spotted something wrong with her unborn baby.
What is miscarriage and why do pregnancies fail?
MISCARRIAGE is generally the death of an unborn baby in the first 24 weeks – approximately six months – of pregnancy.
Miscarriages may not be spoken about a lot but they are very common. Baby loss charity Tommy’s estimates there are at least 250,000 per year in the UK and that one in every five pregnancies ends in miscarriage.
It may not be clear why a miscarriage happens but they are rarely caused by anything done by the mother or father. Usually the embryo has a random genetic defect that means it cannot develop properly.
Most women can go on to successfully have healthy babies in the future.
The NHS says most miscarriages cannot be prevented but avoiding smoking, alcohol and drugs while pregnant can reduce the risk.
Some of the other most common reasons for a pregnancy to fail in the first 24 weeks are ectopic pregnancy and molar pregnancy.
Ectopic pregnancy is where a fertilised egg implants somewhere outside of the womb, usually in a fallopian tube. It cannot survive and grow there so either dies naturally or must be terminated.
Molar pregnancy is rarer but happens when a fertilised egg and/or placenta does not develop properly at the start of a pregnancy. There is no single reason why it happens and cannot be prevented, though it may be more common in very young or old mothers.
A baby who dies after 24 weeks is considered a stillbirth.
Source: NHS
‘Loved being pregnant’
She said: “We went for what was a 20-week scan, but we were actually 22 weeks, and that was just the worst day of my life. Like, horrendous.
“I just knew something was wrong in the scan. I’ve never experienced an out-of-body experience where everything goes in slow motion.”
Two weeks later, Perrie and Alex were given the heartbreaking news that there was no heartbeat. She said: “So then I remember sobbing. Alex was injured at the time and couldn’t really drive.
“He was struggling to drive, but I couldn’t see straight. I was just distraught. We basically lost the baby at, like, 24 weeks.”
Perrie also revealed she had another miscarriage, not long before she had son Axel, who was a “rainbow baby” — the term used for a tot born after a previous pregnancy loss.
The star explained: “I had a miscarriage very early on with my first ever pregnancy.
“I remember finding out I was pregnant. Obviously, I started bleeding not long after, and I went to hospital and I had the scan and they were like, ‘There’s no baby.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve made this up.
“Maybe I got a false positive or something’. I remember being on my own at the appointments.”
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