Amy Price, Katie Price’s mother, has spoken out about how her lung transplant has changed her life as she battles a fatal illness.
The 71-year-old is Katie’s mother and grandma to her five children, Harvey Price, Junior Andre, Princess Andre, Jett Hayler, and Bunny Hayler.
She also has a daughter, Sophie, and a son, Dan, and she had a single lung transplant in November without telling her children because she didn’t want them to say their goodbyes.
Amy has idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a deadly lung ailment, and while the lung transplant has altered her life, she first became terribly unwell, admitting she died and had to be brought back to life before drifting into a coma.
Amy characterised her condition as ‘up and down’ a year later in an interview with The Daily Star and other media.
Explaining the ‘weather has an impact on my breathing,’ she said she currently cannot go outside without a face mask as the weather ‘literally takes my breath away’.
While she’s ‘had a few setbacks’ and can’t work out outside, she is keeping fit by going to the gym for spin classes – which can be difficult as she gets ‘breathless,’ but ‘if I don’t exercise, I won’t move forward… I’ve got to exercise to get [the lung transplant] working.’
This summer, the TV celebrity launched her memoir, The Last Word, in which she chronicles her experience as a mother to Katie and is giving the revenues to charity.
In an episode of the Katie Price Show podcast, she was asked how many times she had died and she related her terrifying experience of ‘dying’ on the operating table.
Amy clarified it was ‘only the once,’ and while she can’t remember it, she was apparently ‘shouting out, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.”’
She stated that she felt this was occurring throughout the procedure and remembers telling herself that if she died, she could be at peace with it.
‘I thought: You know, if I go … Sophie’s alright, Kate will sort herself out, Dan’s alright… it’s okay to go.
‘I felt everything was falling in place, and I could just go.’
Katie then revealed excitedly: ‘And guess what – drumrolls – she didn’t go and she’s lived to tell the tale.’
OnlyFans model Katie confessed her anxiety of seeing her mother after the procedure, thus it was a hard road to recovery for her.
‘You looked like a blown-up Wotsit,’ Katie declared, adding: ‘You looked like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Veruca, when she blows up,’ admitting it was terrifying to see.
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a disorder that causes the lungs to scar and makes breathing difficult.
Katie previously said that after her mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, she was given a life expectancy of three to five years.
