Even during the anguish of giving birth to a child she would never know, Paris Fury put on a brave face for the sake of her husband, who was on the brink of his WBC world heavyweight fight with Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk.
Just two days before the title fight, Paris was admitted to Lancaster Hospital and was told she would have to deliver their dead son.
She explains, “My mother came over and I had a friend there. I went in from early in the morning and left in the evening, but when I went in, they said I was too far on to be put to sleep and told me, ‘You've got to have the baby.’”
She said: “The whole time I was in the hospital, Tyson was FaceTiming me, saying, ‘You’re all right then?”
Tyson offered to send a private jet to take her to Saudi.
Paris added: “I kept telling him. ‘No, I don’t want to risk it. He told me later, ‘I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t want to believe it.’”
It hadn’t been long since Paris had given birth to Rico in the same hospital, and the thought of being in the same brightly-painted birthing room broke her. “I sort of had a bit of a breakdown. I started screaming, ‘You can’t put me in that room.’”
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Andy Stenning/Daily Mirror)But the hospital’s compassionate staff had arranged for her to give birth in a different room. “The staff there were amazing, and there was a midwife with me the whole way through. It’s a horrific ordeal to go through but they were exceptional.”
Paris returned home to her children, who range in age from Rico, now one, to 15 and were mostly blissfully unaware of her trauma. She added: “The little ones didn’t know about it, but my older daughter understood and she helped me in the home.”
Tyson lost his fight in Saudi while Paris watched on TV. She said: “It’s just such a shame that he wasn’t able to win the fight. It felt upsetting again.”
Paris did not want to break the bad news to Tyson over the phone so she waited for him to arrive home next day.
She said: “It does affect the father, but for the woman who carries that child, it is more severe. No matter how much it hurts Tyson, it’s 10 times worse for me. But where I’d had time to process the idea, it took him days to face the burial. He said, ‘I can’t do it right now.’”
The couple buried their baby in a private location, and they remained silent until Tyson broke the news while announcing a rematch with Usyk in December.
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