'The universe was conspiring against me': Leigh Sales opens up about traumatic birth and break-up

SHE’S usually the one asking the questions, but Leigh Sales has opened up about her own hardships, from nearly dying in childbirth to her marriage breakdown and her father’s death.

The 7.30 presenter said she had “a series of a bad things” happen to her, culminating with a flat tyre while she was taking her eldest child to hospital after her father had died.

“Every night when I’m hosting 7.30, there’s almost someone who has got out of bed, brushed their teeth, had their breakfast, gone about their everyday business having an ordinary day and then suddenly, out of the blue, something happens and their whole life gets transformed forever — it’s such a common thing in the news,” she said, in an interview on The Project promoting her book, Any Ordinary Day.

“It sort of unsettled me, it’s uncomfortable to think about it.

“But then in 2014, I had series of bad things that I write about in the book that happened to me, beginning with the birth of my second child, which had a complication that’s normally fatal for both the mother and the child, and we were just sort of lucky that I was at the hospital at the time. And that really rattled me as well and made me have a sense of my own mortality.”

The TV star had suffered a uterine rupture — a tear the size of a cricket ball — in the upper left side of her uterus. The condition is rare and often “catastrophic”, with her surgeon revealing her abdomen was “a sea of blood.”

She decided to explore the topic of ordinary days that rapidly go wrong, beginning work on her book that same year.

But even when she was putting the finishing touches to it, The Project co-host Lisa Wilkinson observed, “life kept throwing you curve balls.”

Sales’s book was at the printers and she had taken a month off work to care for her eldest child, who was having an operation. “A week after that, my father died, and I went home to Queensland,” she said. “But I had to then fly back to Sydney to take my son back for his post-operative appointment, and on the way to hospital, I got a flat tyre.”

The panel laughed and groaned in sympathy, as Wilkinson asked: “What did you think at that point?”

Sales replied: “I just was resigned almost, I just abandoned the car at the side of the road and just called an Uber.

“I thought, are you joking? That my father just died and I’ve got a flat tyre? It just felt like the universe was conspiring against me.”

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