Alex Jones has revealed she hosted The One Show just an hour after finding out she had suffered a miscarriage in 2017.
The TV star, who has a two-year-old son, Teddy, and is seven-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child, said the experience has made it hard for her to relax.
She told The Sunday Telegraph’s Stella magazine: “We actually got pregnant in October 2017, when Teddy was 10 months, and we lost that baby.
“I didn’t realise for a long time because I had been breastfeeding and your periods don’t come back straight away.”
Jones said she found out she was expecting another child with husband Charlie Thomson, 40, an insurance broker, while they were visiting his parents in New Zealand when she became unwell.
She said: “It was so unexpected, but we were thrilled.
“In hindsight, when I was very ill in New Zealand, that’s probably when everything was falling apart.”
When they arrived back in the UK, they arranged a private scan to establish a due date and learned the news that she had had a symptomless miscarriage.
She said: “We learnt the baby didn’t have a heartbeat. I was around 14 weeks, which is a decent amount of time.
“The baby had stopped developing at about nine weeks. That was really hard. It hit us like a ton of bricks.
“It’s really odd. You’re in that room looking for answers that you’re never going to get. You’re thinking, ‘Have I done something wrong? What did I do differently? Was it because we flew a long way? Was I too stressed? Was I putting too much pressure on myself?’”
An hour later she was back on television, even though her boss had told her she did not need to do the show.
Jones said: “I said, ‘What else am I going to do?’ It’s a horrible feeling because it is so empty.
“There’s nothing to say. It’s done.
“I’m not saying it’s easier or harder if you already have [a child]. The sense is at least you have a healthy child, but you remember how it felt at that point, you know what it’s like to hold a baby and the potential is very real.”
Six months later she became pregnant again, but said it was “completely different”.
She added: “You don’t let yourself relax. I couldn’t enjoy it for a long time and didn’t tell anyone for ages.”
She recently suffered a scare after not feeling the baby move for a couple of days and went to hospital, where she shared a picture on her Instagram story of her hooked up to a monitor and writing: “If in doubt mammas ALWAYS check! So reassuring to hear the heartbeat.”