'It was a tough time': Lily Allen on almost losing baby Ethel
POP star Lily Allen has opened up about the pain she faced when her eldest daughter Ethel was struck down with a life-threatening illness.
The Hard Out Here hit maker, who performed at Glastonbury last Friday, fought back tears as she recalled how scared she was about losing her little girl after she was diagnosed with laryngomalacia.
The throat condition which causes the larynx to collapse into the airway, left Ethel, now aged two, tube-fed for eight months and she had to undergo two operations.
During an interview on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Lily 29, found it difficult to talk and kept sniffling as she spoke about Ethel's struggle to eat and breathe.
Lily said: "She was working so hard to breathe, to just exist really, and she wasn't really gaining any weight at all.
It was just a really tough time
"Because all of the food she was taking on, she was just expending the energy on this breathing process."
She added: "I was scared of losing her the whole time, all I wanted to do was just breastfeed her and to sit there in my chair with her and spend those precious hours into the night looking after your child."
The star - who suffered a stillbirth in 2010 - admitted the treatment process for Ethel was equally traumatic as the diagnosis.
She 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 says Ethel's health problems have disappeared and she is "absolutely fine now".
Lily made headlines at Glastonbury by taking to the Pyramid stage adorned with enormous baby milk bottles as a nod to her new role as mummy, while her doting husband Sam Cooper watched from the sidelines.