Former Miss France Reveals Harrowing Pregnancy Ordeal: From Fear of Death to Emergency C-Section

Malika Ménard was marked by the end of her pregnancy. She began to suffer from aches and pains from head to toe. "My whole body was hurting, I couldn’t find a comfortable position in bed and after that, it was like that every day with extreme fatigue [...] I had cold sweats and then it would turn into shivers. I had difficulty breathing, I was having little fainting spells," she confides to Yahoo. After a week of suffering, she decides to call the doctor. Her heart rate "is much too high for someone at rest," the doctor observes, who urges her to go for a blood test.

The results being worrying, the obstetrician asks Malika to return immediately to the maternity ward. Monitoring will be carried out for her and her baby. After this care, she does not feel reassured. She continues to worry. "I was afraid of dying, because I was in a state of fatigue where you really have to tell yourself that to walk 100 meters, I had to mentally prepare and tell myself ’you’re going to make it Malika!’" The expectant mother was mostly afraid of "leaving her daughter all alone to come into the world."

The doctor recommends a cesarean delivery. Enough to exacerbate her anxiety. "He told me: ’We’re doing a C-section, we have to get her out and help you heal,’" says the journalist. Panicked, she goes down to the operating room "like in the movies." "I heard Sherazade who also started, even though everything was going well, to have her heart beating very, very fast. [...] For a few seconds, it’s true that I said to myself: I’m going to leave her alone. What is she going to do?" confides the 37-year-old woman.

Fortunately, the emergency C-section goes normally. Little Sherazade is born in good health, despite being 5 weeks early. Her mother is doing well. "I was relieved to see that she was a good size and weighed 2.9 kg [...] You say to yourself, she’s mine, that’s it, we’re linked forever," expresses the native of Normandy. She is not completely serene, however. "Being a mom is worrying all day long," ironizes the one who admits to always having fears about her daughter’s health. "The first nights, I watched her sleep from start to finish. I went ’knock knock knock, are you sleeping?’ And if she didn’t move at all, I went a little harder to make sure I could hear her breathing or moving."