“God, let me hear my daughter cry.” That was the only thing Hayden Panettiere asked for while she was undergoing emergency surgery in 2014.
The actress, now 36 years old, revealed in her new book This Is Me: A Reckoning that during the C-section for her daughter Kaya, she felt that she was, in her own words, “knocking on death’s door”. She lost so much blood that she needed seven transfusions and then had to overcome a serious infection. Even so, she said she was not afraid: she was willing to sacrifice herself for her daughter without hesitating for a second.
What came next was another silent battle. Postpartum depression hit her so hard that in 2018, when Kaya was just 4 years old, she decided to give custody to her ex-partner Wladimir Klitschko so she could seek treatment. Today, with her daughter back in her life, Hayden says she is not looking to close that wound but to understand it, and that she decided to tell everything in the hope that no mother feels alone in her pain.
