EastEnders legend Natalie Cassidy has opened up about the traumatic time she endured when her seven-year-old daughter Joanie needed urgent hospital treatment.
On her podcast Life with Nat, the 41-year-old soap star shared the distressing tale of how a simple cartwheel led to her daughter breaking her arm, and the subsequent surgery that followed.
Natalie recounted the gut-wrenching moment she witnessed Joanie being put under general anaesthetic, admitting she felt “horrible” during the ordeal, and that even a nurse was taken aback by the length of the operation.
The family’s much-anticipated holiday hung in the balance as the surgery turned out to be more complicated than initially anticipated.
(Image: Getty Images)
Detailing the events, Natalie said: “We went into the hospital, she had her operation, she went under general anaesthetic which is horrible, it’s really, really horrible to watch your child go under general anaesthetic and I felt rather stressed.”, reports the Mirror.
“Mark came with me in the morning but he was filming the Proms so he had to go off and I sat there in the hospital. It’s meant to be roughly about an hour until they give you a call to say go down and meet your daughter in recovery.”
“Hour, hour and a half, hour and 45 minutes, two hours, two and a quarter. I thought ‘What is going on? What’s happened? ‘, then this lovely nurse called Carla, all the staff by the way in Harlow are so wonderful.”
“Then she came over, Carla, she said, ‘Oh they have been quite a long time I’m going to ring down’. You think, ‘For goodness sake, if the nurse is worried, what’s going on?’.”
(Image: Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock)
Natalie went on: “So anyway it was about two and a half hours, I went down to see Joanie and they had to put two plates in [her] arm to hold the bones together because Joanie had broken two bones, so she’s got two little plates in her arm.”
“They’ve had to make some incisions, little cuts…because her bones were too small, couldn’t get the wires through and we weren’t really sure if we were going to be going on holiday. The big news is we’re going on holiday.”
This comes as Natalie announced she would be taking a hiatus from EastEnders to embark on a project with Channel 4.
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
