Hollyoaks star Kirsty-Leigh Porter has opened up about a devastating time in her life when she lost her baby girl during pregnancy.
The actress, best known for her role as Leela Lomax in the Channel 4 soap, lost her first daughter, Penny-Leigh, when she was 29 weeks and three days pregnant.
In December 2018, Kirsty-Leigh went to the hospital after experiencing reduced movements. She had a scan, and was then told her baby had died after doctors were unable to find a heartbeat.
Kirsty-Leigh then gave birth to Penny-Leigh in hospital. She held the little girl and took prints of her feet and hands. Kirsty-Leigh and partner Paul Barber then started to organise a funeral, and ordeal that caused overwhelming emotion and a great deal of pain.
Opening up about the dark time in her life, Kirsty-Leigh explained how she dealt with feelings of loneliness, and how she will ‘never get over it’:
‘I’m not the Kirsty I was before Penny-Leigh’, she told OK! Magazine.
‘My soul left for a little bit after Penny-Leigh. Everything flips upside down. You never get over it, you never forget. There’s always going to be a part of you that’s missing. I remember one day when I got up and I thought, “I can’t carry on like this any more, I have to do something”. I do a lot of writing. Once I’ve written what’s running through my head, I feel like I’ve offloaded a lot.’
Discussing the feeling of something changing in her mind, and a sense of moving forward, Kirsty-Leigh said: ‘My turning point was thinking, “I’ve now got the best guardian angel in the world that I could ever ask for and I’m going to wake up every morning and do her proud.” That kept me going. I thought, “She doesn’t want to see me in bed grieving, I want to make her proud”‘.
In 2020, Kirsty-Leigh gave birth to her baby girl called Nala Rai. Reflecting on the arrival of her ‘rainbow baby’ – two years after losing Penny-Leigh – the soap star said:
‘I felt like I was living but not really living. I felt like the breath had been sucked out of me, that my soul had been sucked out of me. Then she got here and I felt like I could breathe again.’
‘Nala means a fresh breath of air, it means water, earth, new life. Rai is short for Rainbow because she’s a rainbow baby. I want Nala to know she has a big sister. I don’t know how or when I’m going to tell her that.’
In a recent interview on ITV daytime show Loose Women, she told the panellists: ‘I remember the day. I was having Sunday dinner at my mum and dads and I’d gone home, and was a bit worried that I hadn’t felt much movement that day.’
‘I was 29 weeks, 3 days [pregnant]. I phoned my mum, did the normal thing. Even that – I’m trying to spread awareness of “just don’t wait”
‘That first phone call should be to the maternity ward, and say “I’m coming in, I need to be checked, something doesn’t feel right”‘.
She went on to describe the moment that she was told her baby had died: ‘When I got to the hospital, they hook you up to the machine to monitor baby’s heartbeat and they couldn’t find it. On the scan it showed Penny-Leigh had passed away.
‘I was on my own.’
As presenter Mylene Klass reflected on the silence after suffering her own miscarriages, she reached out and grabbed Kirsty-Leigh’s hand.
Over in Hollyoaks, her character will experience a similar ordeal to herself, as Leela soon realises her baby has stopped moving.
The much-loved stalwart, as viewers know, discovered that she was pregnant with Joel’s baby at the end of last year, with the two excited to embark on this new chapter of their lives together.
After advice from a midwife, Leela chooses to go to the hospital for an update but fails to wake up a sleeping Joel.
At the hospital, Leela is put on a fetal heart monitor and initial results are unclear, which leads to a consultant being summoned.
What happens in the immediate aftermath remains to be seen, but the subsequent episode sees the hospital desperately trying to get in touch with Joel, who is still sound asleep.
