Doctors found my sepsis after I went through a 16-hour labour, reveals Oti
FORMER Strictly star Oti Mabuse has opened up for the first time about the ‘traumatic’ birth of her first child, who was born with an infection after doctors missed her own sepsis.
The dancer, 33, went into a 16-hour labour with her daughter ‘really early’ last autumn and spent the next six weeks in hospital.
While the delivery was normal, Ms Mabuse said doctors quickly realised her daughter had ‘infections’ and whisked the child away for tests.
‘In that moment, you’re happy and you’re feeling elated, you did this thing and it took 16 hours,’ she said.
‘you see your child for two minutes and they get taken away by a group of ten midwives and doctors – that’s when things start to change, that’s when things hit you.’ The dancer-turned-presenter said she did not get the ‘skin-on-skin contact’ that she was hoping for, and she was unable to hold her baby for a week.
Speaking on the Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast, Ms Mabuse said: ‘She was 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. It was something that... was missed or was not seen or was not tested for.’
Despite the life-threatening condition initially going undetected by medical staff, she praised the NHS for its ‘amazing’ support.
Ms Mabuse, who is married to fellow dancer Marius Iepure, said all she could do was look at her daughter from a wheelchair as they both recovered.
‘The first thing that you want to do is hold the baby, but you can’t, you have to just look at them,’ she said.
‘And I remember crying because I couldn’t get the wheelchair close to her bed, and that was traumatising and emotionally very exhausting.
‘The last ten weeks have been hard, but life changing.’
The Mail launched the End the Sepsis Scandal campaign with the UK Sepsis Trust in 2016 to raise patient and staff awareness of symptoms.