Florence Welch of Florence & The Machine revealed in a new interview that she almost died once due to an ectopic pregnancy and had to undergo emergency life-saving surgery.
The “Dog Days are Over” hitmaker recounted the “devastating” experience to the Guardian Saturday.
“The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death,” she revealed to the outlet. “And I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”
An ectopic pregnancy occurs “when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus,” according to the Mayo Clinic. It can cause severe abdominal or pelvic pain accompanied by vaginal bleeding, extreme lightheadedness and other symptoms.
Welch, now 39, said she found herself pregnant at 37 with her on-again, off-again guitarist boyfriend — whose identity she chose to keep private out — in 2023.
The “Never Let Me Go” singer was scheduled at the time to headline the Cornwall Music Festival.
However, on the day of her show, Welch recalled feeling sickly and in pain, looking pale, and bleeding heavily. Her doctors advised her at that point to get checked after her performance.
She returned to London and met with her physician, who discovered that her fallopian tube had ruptured.
“I had a Coke can’s worth of blood in my abdomen,” Welch added in the interview.
The songstress ended up needing to have emergency surgery to have the tube removed.
The experience sparked a primal urge in Welch to try to “run away” during the procedure, but said she couldn’t go “anywhere,” adding that she later became “so embarrassed that [she] was causing a fuss.”
“It was animal instinct. Like, run. But there was an [ultrasound wand] inside me and a woman I’d never met before, and I was like, ‘Gotta go!’” “Shake It Out” singer said.
“I think the sound that came out of me was like a wounded animal or something,” she emotionally added. “And then, that was that.”
Welch had been due to perform at another festival around the same time of her health matter.
“If I’d got on that plane, I’d have come off on a stretcher. Or worse,” she recalled.
As Welch further reflected on the trauma of losing her baby, she also talked about how she once felt her first miscarriage was a normal part of pregnancy.
“I spoke to my doctor, and they are not generally dangerous. Devastating, but not dangerous,” she said.
Welch’s latest revelation about what she went through comes years after she shocked her fans by canceling a series of UK tour dates abruptly in August 2023.
While it was originally believed that the cancellation was due to a foot injury, she later shared that the surgery was due to reasons she didn’t “really feel strong enough to go into yet” but that “saved [her] life.”
“And I will be back to close out the Dance Fever tour in Lisbon and Malaga (maybe not jumping so much but you can do that for me),” the “Free” singer continued at the time. “Suffice to say I wish the songs were less accurate in their predictions. But creativity is a way of coping, mythology is way of making sense.”
Welch concluded in her past post, “And the dark fairytale of Dave Fever, with all its strange prophecies, will provide me with much needed strength and catharsis right now.”
