Kate Lawler on her recent hospital trip: 'It was all too much for me'
Kate Lawler has opened up about the issues behind her recent hospital visit with what she feared at the time was a heart attack.
The Big Brother winner - who has spoken honestly in the past about post-natal depression after the birth of her daughter Noa - said she was worried the pressures of the past two years had 'come to a head'.
Speaking to Kate Thornton on the White Wine Question Time podcast, the author, DJ and radio presenter said doctors suspected her symptoms might be linked to stress.
She said: "I think it was all too much for me... It has been a bit of a stressful period. Just too much work, me feeling guilty that I'm not spending enough time with my daughter.
"And feeling like I'm not spending enough time with [her fiance] Boj, and focusing on what's really important to me. And that's my family."
WATCH: Kate Lawler on early motherhood, winning Big Brother and being present for her daughter
In the past year, Lawler and her fiance, Martin Bojtos, had moved house prior to having daughter Noa.
Lawler then struggled with postnatal depression, while Bojtos set up his own company after being made redundant.
Lawler also launched her book - Maybe Baby: On the Mother Side - and left her job at Virgin radio.
She said: "So it's all just come to a head recently, which is why I think I ended up in hospital the other week.
"I thought I was having a bloody heart attack Kate, but I wasn't, they think it's stress."
Saying she'd had heart palpitations and was struggling to breathe, Lawler was reluctant to call an ambulance but when the pain in one arm started to spread to the other, she did.
She said: "It was the week after the book launch, where I was doing a lot of press and talking about the book and reliving those dark days of postnatal depression and how I felt and what I thought about myself, Noa and my relationships. And maybe it was all of that combined."
Lawler won the third series of Big Brother in 2002. She has since worked at various radio stations, as a club DJ and has written a book about her journey to motherhood.
Speaking in her first week since taking the decision to leave Virgin Radio, where she had been for six years, she said she was going to use the next two months doing 'as little work as possible' and focussing on planning her wedding.
She said: "I really feel like I've cracked it and that leaving Virgin was the right decision at the right time. I can now breathe a sigh of relief that I have a bit more time to do all these things that are important to me like I'm focusing on the wedding now.
"It's all about just like spending the next two months doing as little work as possible, just to take a little breather, and make sure that I'm happy on my wedding day.
"I don't want to feel like I've been feeling on my wedding day, I want to be a happy bride."
Speaking about the couple's decision to go into therapy - which she says she 'cannot recommend enough' - Lawler said there needs to be more conversations about how much having a child can impact your relationship.
Before having Noa, she hosted a podcast called Maybe Baby in which she discussed whether or not she wanted to have children.
She said in some of their arguments over the past year, she had 'hated herself' for saying she knew they shouldn't have had a baby because of the resentment it would cause between them.
"I hate myself for saying that," she said, "because it's horrible for him to hear it from me saying: 'I knew that it would do this to us, I knew that it would break us, I knew that we would end up resenting each other and falling out and becoming distant and being in like the worst place possible for a couple who are about to get married.'
"But we're coming out of the other side, we know what we need to do. And we were, we're trying to make sure that... going into our marriage, we want to start on the right foot."
Read more: Kate Lawler quits Virgin Radio after six years to be more present in child's life
She said that during her struggle with depression, she would sometimes wish that she could "turn back time and forget that this ever happened".
"Obviously I don't feel like that now but when you're in the deep dark depths of depression, you can't help but feel those things and now, I feel terrible for thinking those things.
"But it's all part of the process and I just think it's more harmful to not have these conversations actually about how postnatal depression can happen to anyone."
WATCH: Kate Lawler on being a new mum
