England’s Missy Bo Kearns says Aston Villa doctors ‘probably saved my life’ after miscarriage, sepsis

England’s Missy Bo Kearns says Aston Villa doctors ‘probably saved my life’ after miscarriage, sepsis

England midfielder Missy Bo Kearns says Aston Villa’s club doctors likely saved her life after she suffered a miscarriage and contracted sepsis.

Kearns, 25, and her partner Liam Walsh, a midfielder for Luton Town, announced her pregnancy at the beginning of March, but shared the news that she had suffered a miscarriage later that month.

The Aston Villa midfielder explained she had been doing gym work at the club earlier that day before experiencing “the shivers”. She assumed this was a pregnancy symptom, but Villa doctor Jodie Blackadder-Weinstein checked her temperature, which was 42°C, and told her to call Walsh and go to the hospital.

“I’m so thankful for the doctors here at Villa, because if I was at home that day, and I probably would have rung my mum saying, ‘Oh, I feel a bit like flu-ish symptoms’. Everyone would just say, ‘Have a sleep’ or whatnot,” Kearns told ITV News.

“And Jodie made me go to the hospital, and I was not wanting to go, because there’s nothing worse than going to a hospital.

“But they probably saved my life because I had sepsis, and while having that, I wasn’t even thinking about the sepsis. It was ‘I’ve lost my child’.”

Kearns described feeling a “different kind of grief”, as she deals with the loss of her baby, coupled with the emotional ups and downs of pregnancy and hormonal changes. She emphasised the importance of her and others talking about their experiences, adding: “I just hope that people may not suffer in silence now”.

“I think people might not realise how much of a toll it actually has on someone,” she said. “Everyone knows how hard it must be to lose a child, but obviously, because of the highs of finding out you’re pregnant, and the stress of being pregnant, and the worries of getting past the 12-week mark, and it’s so stressful, even though it’s so exciting.