After a stressful 30-plus hour labour before welcoming her second baby, son Shackleton, Joss Stone is feeling thankful that things are going “really great” at home with her two kids.
The English singer, 35, details her “scary” birth experience in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, sharing that she was going through “massive amounts of pain” before she required an emergency cesarean section.
Stone, who shares daughter Violet, 21 months, and baby Shackleton with partner Cody DaLuz, states that though she had been “preparing for my whole life” to have a natural birth, things didn’t go as expected when welcoming her son last month. (She also welcomed daughter Violet via c-section.)
“[Shackleton’s] heartbeat was at normal rate. And then all of a sudden, it just slowed down, massively slowed down. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s my baby. That’s not good,’ ” Stone recalls.
Joss Stone says she was already 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 shares.
Stone says she remembers around 15 doctors and nurses in the room all “talking over me” before her baby’s heart rate “massively slowed down” again.
“He was coming down the birth canal, and when my uterus split, his head went into my abdomen and he went back up,” she recalls. “They had to bring him back to breathing again.”
She was then brought into the operating room where Stone simply remembers a doctor telling her, “‘OK, we’re going to sleep,’ and then I woke up, I had my baby and everything was okay.”
Joss Stone says she’s “super grateful” to the doctors and nurses who “turned up so quickly” to take care of her and her baby. “It was like having 15 angels fly into the room. They were trying to make me feel comfortable. They were very nice and professional and made me feel safe.”
The musician, who recently released her first-ever Christmas album Merry Christmas, Love, is now soaking up time at home with both of her kids. “It’s really great because Violet is so in love with him,” says Stone. “She wants to kiss him all the time. She was screaming with excitement to meet him. I mean, she wanted to see the baby more than she wanted to see me.”