Rebecca Adlington launching SMA Nutrition UK and Ireland campaign
Rebecca Adlington has courageously shared her family’s experience of miscarriage to help others going through a similar situation feel less alone, after losing her baby at 12 weeks last summer.
The 34-year-old former Olympic swimmer revealed that her husband Andy Parsons was convinced they were having a daughter during an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk.
“I don’t like to go ‘What if?’ but he had pictured it in his head that it was going to be a girl,” she said.
The athlete feels it’s vital to remember that the father of the unborn child is experiencing “emotional trauma” too.
“[In my case], people kept saying, ‘How’s Becky?’ but [my husband] has suffered that miscarriage too. It was his child as well, so it’s important to be supportive,” she explained.
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Rebecca admits that she’d “never expected” to go through a “devastating” miscarriage, let alone to end up in hospital with sepsis for almost a week and be forced to have emergency surgery.
She has two children – eight-year-old daughter Summer from a previous marriage to fellow swimming star Harry Needs, and two-year-old son Albie, who she shares with Andy.
The couple will never forget the precious child that they lost – and they were touched to receive support from the likes of Paralympian Ellie Simmonds and ex-Coronation Street actress Catherine Tyldesley.
Rebecca has shared that she thinks it’s “massively” important to remove stigma around the topic of mental health, after suffering both miscarriage trauma and panic attacks in recent years.
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She’s been retired from professional sport for over a decade, having ended on a high after the 2012 Olympics, and now runs SwimStars, which teaches swimming skills to thousands of children around the UK.
It was actually after leaving sport that she began to experience panic attacks, but she has explained: ” I think it’s so important to kind of be open and honest about it.
“When something’s not openly spoken about all the time, you think: ‘Everybody has that, everybody has bad days, so why wouldn’t there be days where you wake up and feel anxious?'” she explained.
“It wasn’t until I spoke to my husband – my boyfriend at the time – [and others] that people told me ‘This isn’t normal.'”
She added: “I appreciate that therapy doesn’t work for everyone and everyone has their own ways of dealing with mental health issues, but therapy definitely worked for me.
“I feel like if I address the anxiety it doesn’t feel like a cloud and a thunderstorm that’s going to build up.”
Meanwhile, Rebecca recently got involved with a campaign headed up by SMA® PRO Follow-on Milk and Growing up Milk, after being “shocked” to discover that almost half of all children are lacking in Vitamin D and iron.
Albie got involved in a “tryathalon” with six other children in a bid to raise awareness – and Rebecca said he loved the experience of “crawling, pushing and bean bag throwing”.
For more details about the campaign and how iron and Vitamin D help support cognitive development and immune system function in kids, or to find out how to try one of the TRYathlon challenges at home, readers can visit www.smababy.co.uk or @smanutritionuki on Instagram.
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