Joss Stone is opening up about the traumatic birth of her second baby.
On Oct. 18, the English singer and partner Cody DaLuz welcomed their second baby, son Shackleton, and while things are now going "really great" at home with her two kids (Stone also shares Violet, 21 months, with DaLuz), it was a "scary" birth experience that involved "massive amounts of pain" and ended in an emergency cesarean section.
Stone revealed details of the birth in an interview with People, explaining that she had been "preparing for my whole life" to have a natural birth, but things did not go as expected.
"When I first arrived in that hospital, the nurse that was on call said, 'Do you have a birth plan?' I said, 'My plan is to birth my baby. If something goes wrong and if my baby's in danger, you guys are going to birth my baby. I'm just going to give it to you.' That is exactly what I did," she explained.
Stone recalled being in labor for over 30 hours when the nurse told her they would need to call in the obstetric emergency team.
"She comes up to me and she goes, 'The room is going to fill up with a lot of people. Don't worry about it. Just stay calm.' Then Cody looks at me and he said the same thing," she explained, recalling how around 15 doctors and nurses then filtered into the room.
Then her baby's heart rate "massively slowed down."
"He was coming down the birth canal, and when my uterus split, his head went into my abdomen and he went back up," Stone continued. "They had to bring him back to breathing again."
She was taken into the operating room where she remembers a doctor telling her, "'OK, we're going to sleep,' and then I woke up, I had my baby and everything was OK."
Earlier this year, when announcing that she was pregnant with Shackleton, Stone revealed that she had suffered a miscarriage several months prior.
In an emotional video posted on Instagram, she explained that in October 2021, she miscarried. Stone tried to seek answers from the doctor as to why it had happened, and he assured her it was not her fault. But she pressed him for answers.
"Well, maybe now your baby is an angel watching over you," she recalled the doctor saying.
"'It's sh**ty, it's a horrible, horrible thing. And it's not something that you can get over. It's something that you have to live with," Stone continued in her video, explaining that the doctor told her to revisit him for a check-up in spring.
"So I said, 'OK doc, I will see you when the daffodils bloom,' and this is what happened."
Stone then shared a clip of herself holding up a positive pregnancy test.
"So, that's the beautiful part of the story, is that there are rainbows after storms, and it's just lovely and I'm very excited. I can't wait to meet my baby," she said. "And I hope and pray that everything's OK. And I'm just, I'm very excited to announce it but I didn't want to not acknowledge my baby before."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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