Shortly after giving birth to her first child, singer-songwriter Lucy Rose went to take her son out of her crib when she collapsed.
For what seemed like an eternity, she lay on the floor in agony with back spasms.
Over the next few weeks, her pain only got worse.
“I couldn’t lift my baby, I couldn’t push a stroller, I couldn’t even wash my hair,” she tells the BBC.
If she needed to breastfeed, her husband Will had to lift the baby for her. When her parents persuaded her to go for a walk, she walked 100 meters before stopping and “begging to go home.”
In her NCT baby group, she asked other mothers if they had experienced similar back pain. None of them had done it.
Her GP was no help either.
“Every time she came in it was the same thing,” she says. “I was screaming in pain and then he was poking me in the back and saying, ‘It’s okay here; back pain is an integral part of having a baby.’
“It got to the point where I was crying, begging for an MRI and the doctor told me I needed to tone it down and that I was overreacting.
“He was really quite distressing.”
Finally, she went to a chiropractor. It was a big mistake.
“My back was broken and it was the worst pain he had ever experienced,” she says. “I immediately thought, ‘That can’t have been right, I’m going to get sick right away.'”
Looking back, she thinks that may have been the point where several of her vertebrae were broken.
Rose tells me this story over a Zoom call from Spain, where she’s taking a vacation to regain strength ahead of the release of her exquisite fifth album, This Ai n’t The Way You Go Out, on Friday.
