'I was in intensive care for four days and almost died. I got myself home and I didn’t want to think about dying any more'
The Britain’s Got Talent judge spent four days in intensive care after she nearly died during labour with her second daughter Hollie, now one.
Amanda, 42, was criticized by some, including users of the website ‘Mumsnet,’ for returning to her spot on the TV talent show so soon after giving birth to her child.
But defending her new actions in a new interview, the mum-of-two said she needed take her mind off the horror of what she had just been through.
‘I was in intensive care for four days and almost died. I got myself home and I didn’t want to think about dying any more,’ she told a UK newspaper.
'I knew I had to pick myself up and pull myself out of it'
The star, who also has a seven-year-old daughter, Lexi, with her record producer husband Chris Hughes, said she wanted things to go back to normal for the sake of her eldest child.
‘One day Lexi came home from school and was appalled I was still in my pyjamas. I knew I had to pick myself up and pull myself out of it.’
‘My body was really swollen. I looked like a rugby player and she had seen me with tubes coming out of me, it was all really hideous.’
‘We protected her from most of the horrors of it. But the normality for her was to see me go back to work and I thought, “I am going back”.’
‘There was one night I went back, and Chris and I were able to forget all the devastation, get on a train have a quiet journey to Edinburgh, do the show and come home.’
Her stint in intensive care came only 13 months after she gave birth to a stillborn son, Leo.
Amanda revealed that she took her new baby along when she did the show in Birmingham two weeks later, a journey which had a special meaning for her:
‘It was the last place I felt my baby son kick me, which was the 31st of January,’ she revealed.
‘On the 1st of February I was told he was going to be stillborn and I had come back from Birmingham that night. I wanted to do that journey, coming back to the place with a baby in my arms and that is no word of a lie.’
‘If it had been Manchester I would have given Hollie to my mum and not put her in the car for that long journey – it was because it was Birmingham.
‘I believe in circles, I believe that was what was meant to be. I came back to where I started.’