EastEnders star Lacey Turner has said she “felt numb” while pregnant with her daughter Dusty following two previous miscarriages.
The actress welcomed her first child with husband Matt Kay last July.
She told ITV’s Loose Women on Thursday that she was unable to get excited about her pregnancy because of her previous losses.
Turner, 31, said her first miscarriage occurred at seven weeks and “was a massive shock as quite naively I thought, ‘I’m going to have a baby’.”
'It hadn't worked and that's the second time, so what do I do now?'
Lacey Turner, who is now a mum to baby Dusty, shares her experience of miscarriage with the #LooseWomen. pic.twitter.com/ZZM3ZkIx4A
— Loose Women (@loosewomen) February 27, 2020
Detailing her heartbreak, she said: “I’d only told my parents and Matt’s parents. Luckily, I didn’t have to tell loads of people that it had gone and it was no longer there, which was a relief actually.
“It’s so hard, what do you say to people? I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable about it. Although I felt so heartbroken, I just thought ‘I’ll brush that under the rug’… and then you think ‘Next time I’ll be fine.’
“It’s hard because are you supposed to grieve for something that’s the size of a grain of rice? People believe different things, but for me it was a baby from the minute it was conceived.”
On her second miscarriage, she said: “It happened again at exactly the same point, but I sort of felt like I was more prepared this time. I was aware that maybe it might not work, whereas before, I just thought, ‘It’ll work. We’d have a baby.’
“The second time I had a miscarriage… although I was more prepared, it was more of a kick in the stomach, because it hadn’t worked the second time and I thought, ‘What do I do now? Is there something wrong, is this going to take us years?’”
Turner said she saw a private doctor and had tests, and “on paper, everything was fine”.
She said she finally became pregnant a third time, but it “took ages”.
She added: “I put so much pressure on myself to fall pregnant and it was happening.
“It got to the point where I said to Matt, ‘Let’s just forget it. We’ll get a puppy.’ As soon as we’d said that, we fell pregnant.”
Turner told the programme she had a weekly scan throughout her pregnancy with Dusty because she was “so scared”.
She said: “Until you feel kicking, you don’t know if anything is actually there.
“I always thought, ‘This might not work,’ I just became really laid back about the whole thing. I just felt numb to the whole thing.”
Turner is best known for playing Stacey Slater in EastEnders since 2004.
She is also known for turns in Bedlam and Switch, as well as the hit drama series Our Girl between 2013 and 2014.