Lily Allen's Daughter Ethel Had Life-Threatening Illness

Lily Allen's Daughter Ethel Had Life-Threatening Illness
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Lily Allen has revealed that her eldest daughter Ethel was struck down with a life-threatening illness.

The 29-year-old mum-of-two told Desert Island Discs she feared for her daughter's life after she was diagnosed with laryngomalacia - a condition which causes the larynx to collapse into the airway.

Ethel, now a healthy two-year-old, was just 12 months at the time.

Lily said: "It's 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."

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Lily – who also has a 16-month-old daughter called Marnie with husband Sam Cooper – said the treatment process for Ethel didn't run smoothly and she was fed via a tube for eight months.

The star - 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."

But Lily soon reassured listeners but insisting that Ethel is 'absolutely fine now."

The singer was at Glastonbury at the weekend where she performed on the Pyramid stage.