Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch have disclosed that they brought their daughter Sophia to the hospital with viral meningitis during the ‘hellish’ school vacation.
During the recent Easter vacation, the couple and their children, Sophia, 12, Liberty, 7, Johnny, 5, and Jack, 3, were in Portugal to enjoy some sunshine as a family.
They did, however, end up making a ‘terrifying’ sprint to the hospital at 1am with Sophia when she acquired the infection.
Meningitis is an infection of the protective membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord that can affect anybody, although it is more frequent in infants, children, and adolescents.
Although viral meningitis is the most common type and people may generally recover on their own, it is critical to seek medical attention right once since it can have life-threatening consequences.
Abbey, 37, and Peter, 42, discussed their experience on their Therapy Couch podcast in an episode broadcast on Tuesday, in which the former model and Strictly Come Dancing winner revealed that the school holidays had been “tough.”
‘We got to Portugal and Sophia was in hospital with bloody meningitis, which was just the scariest thing on earth – being in a foreign hospital, language barriers, the words like meningitis being thrown around, lumbar punctures, brain scans…
‘It was horrific – I felt so vulnerable – and scary. But I must say the medical care over there was just out of this world.’
She also joked of their middle-of-the-night dash: ‘These things always happen on a Sunday at one o’clock in the morning, it’s never Monday afternoon, just to add to that fear and that scariness of the situation.
‘It can never be at normal hour, can it?’
Explaining how they coped with looking after their other kids and being there for Sophia, Peter added: ‘Obviously she (Sophia) had to stay in so we were just doing shifts. I was like doing the night shifts and then Abbey was doing the day shift.
‘And we were on separate holidays completely. It wasn’t a holiday was it to be honest, it was just looking after her.’
The former footballer admitted it was ‘scary’ but that you’ve ‘got to look after the little ones’.
Abbey shared that she had ‘never been so scared in my life’, especially after their other three children got sick too ‘with flu and colds’, putting her on ‘high alert’ as she worried about them catching it too – leading to another hospital visit.
‘We had like four hours sleep in 30 hours,’ she revealed.
The mother of four admitted to having a “genuine fear” of hospitals, but she was concerned that something major was wrong with her kid.
‘With Sophia I just knew something was wrong, like it wasn’t like a normal bug. I was going to Pete, “say meningitis”, and it was. I actually couldn’t bloody believe it.
‘So then having three babies at home I was thinking, “what if they catch it?” We were on like high alert. We didn’t sleep at all.
‘I was watching every child like a hawk. It was just terrifying.’
Sophia, thankfully, has fully recovered.
Abbey previously chastised Peter on the programme for suggesting that reaching the Champions League final was better than the birth of his children.
When confronted with the deadline, he ultimately conceded that he had ‘loosely’ said that.