Instead of taking up to a year’s maternity leave as many new mothers choose to do, Dawn went straight back to work and her feet have still not really touched the ground.Īnd the past 12 months, she admits, have been, without doubt, the busiest of her life. “People do warn you how tough it is being a working mother but you never really know until it is happening to you,” she says. Dawn lost more than two litres of blood and needed an emergency blood transfusion.ĭespite the trauma she barely had time to rest and recover. Little Coco Christie Mary arrived on Novemto the delight of Dawn and her actor boyfriend Paul Blair, 42.īut straight after the birth, things went badly wrong.

“I wanted to have a natural birth and it took me a while to get my head around having a caesarean, but in the end, it was pretty amazing when she popped out.” “I had been put on bed rest for a few days,” says Dawn. This was so serious doctors advised her to have a caesarean section but complications also meant she was forced to be written out of Wild at Heart early and dash home for the birth. She had been diagnosed with placenta praevia, a condition where the placenta grows over the opening of the cervix, making natural birth difficult. So it is no great surprise Dawn struggled as her pregnancy had not gone according to plan. “Four weeks after having Coco, I thought to myself, ‘This is supposed to be amazing and I am not enjoying it at all.’”

“It is like Chinese water torture!” exclaims the actress.

Dawn Steele has always acted like she is made of stern stuff.įor her role as vet Alice Trevanion in ITV1 drama Wild at Heart, she filmed for months on end in the heat of South Africa’s bushland, stepped into cages with lions, put her hand into elephants’ mouths and got up close and personal with all manner of wild animals.Įven her co-star and on-screen husband Stephen Tompkinson describes her as “fearless”.īut nothing prepared the actress for having a baby.ĭawn, 37, gave birth to daughter Coco just over a year ago and she has few good words to say about the onslaught of labour and sleep-deprived nights of early motherhood.

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