Oti: My baby was critical
Dancing on Ice star reveals ordeal after premature birth
DANCING on Ice judge Oti Mabuse’s newborn daughter spent six weeks in a critical condition after being born extremely prematurely.
Oti, who contracted sepsis while giving birth, said not being able to hold her baby was “traumatising”.
The former dancer, 33, revealed: “She came really, really early, unexpectedly premature, which was a big, big, big shock.
“We didn’t hold her for about a week because she was still in an incubator with wires, with jaundice, so she was under blue light.
“And she had infections because it turned out that I had sepsis.”
Oti and husband Marius Iepure, a 41-year-old fellow dancer, welcomed their first child in October after a 16hour labour. They waited for nine weeks until Christmas Day to announce the birth online. The baby girl’s name has not yet been revealed.
Ex-strictly professional Oti said the life-threatening infection was “missed or not tested for”.
She explained: “What happened was the bacteria which protects the baby when it is still in the womb, when your water breaks, it then attacks the baby.
“And so she had infections that they didn’t have time to diagnose, all they had to do was give her antibiotics and make sure that she was OK.
“They just had to give her things like, ticking boxes to make sure that she doesn’t have this and take tests every single night.”
While Oti said the birth itself was “incredible, serene and everything she wanted”, she added: “The last bit was not what I had wanted, where you see your child for two minutes and then get taken away by a group of 10 midwives and doctors.
“That’s when things start to change and things start to hit you and you don’t get that skin on skin, you don’t get to hold your baby.”
“She was in critical condition really, for the first six weeks, and me and Marius just wanted to be there mentally, physically, emotionally.
“My mum as well, she dropped everything and flew directly to England just to be with us.
“And we were just there for her.”
Oti said she found it extremely difficult to be unable to comfort her baby.
She revealed: “I was taken down in a wheelchair because you’re not walking properly, you can’t get up. The first thing you want to do is hold your baby, but you can’t, you have to just look at them. I remember crying because you can’t get the wheelchair close enough to her bed.
“That was traumatising and emotionally very exhausting.”
Oti said the experience must have taken a toll on her baby, too. She said: “It is not something natural a child should feel when they come out. You want everything to feel cosy and loving and slow and serene.
“You hear hospital machines and they get pricked and touched by midwives… It’s just painful to have all those struggles, it’s a lot of pain.”
Oti told the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast she had found the pregnancy tough as it progressed.
She told host Giovanna Fletcher: “I’m a woman with a bigger chest, so carrying the belly and carrying my own boobs, honestly I felt like a bodybuilder.
“I was like ‘this is heavy, this is really, really, really heavy’. And the pain that I was physically feeling in my groin, so all of that started to feel really heavy, and I was still working. So that became a lot.
“My friend would say ‘write in a journal’. I read it the other day and everything was like ‘I’m in pain’. I was actually doing a bit on Big Brother.
That gave me a focus.
“The team was super-accommodating, but looking
BUMP Before the birth back I would literally just have relaxed.
“That’s one thing that I wished I’d have done. It was just something in my head where I was like ‘I need to keep going, I’m going to go until the day I deliver’.”
The Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast is available for download every Tuesday at 6am from acast.com