Henry Golding and wife Liv Lo welcome second daughter Florence… and reveal hair-raising story of difficult birth and NICU stay

Henry Golding and his wife Liv Law have announced the birth of their second daughter Florence – and revealed the rollercoaster story behind her arrival.

The news broke via a joint Instagram post by the proud parents, with a montage of the two greeting little Flo.

In one heart-melting snap, their older daughter Lyla, two, can be seen cradling her newborn sister.

However, in a hair-raising blog on Fit-SphereLiv candidly shared the struggles she and the baby endured at the end of her pregnancy.

Baby Flo endured a stay in intensive care with pneumonia, and Liv herself had to return to hospital with a blood infection after being discharged.

Liv experienced ‘profuse bleeding’ at the start of her labour, and whilst in hospital she developed a fever and on top of that ‘the baby started to go into trouble’.

Although the hospital began preparing for an emergency C-section, Liv quickly reached 10 cm dilation, which meant she “had the option to push, but the baby would have to be born immediately.”

Liv wrote: “Any mother who is threatened with a C-section would do as I did. Florence Lycan Golding was born at 7 pounds at 9:03 am on 9/23.’

Baby Flo went through the first feeding like a champ, but during the second feed she started to ‘grunt’ and wouldn’t stop.

“Sure enough, 2 hours later, around 4 p.m., a NICU nurse came in to put on a pulse oximeter. “They said her pulse was ‘unfavorable’ and they would have to take her to ICU – possibly antibiotics,” Liv revealed.

“The answers took several days, but eventually they discovered that Florence had swallowed meconium while I was in the womb. It developed into pneumonia and required a 10-day course of antibiotics,” she wrote.

“Her health would not have suffered otherwise and her lungs would have healed, but she had to be in intensive care for the first almost two weeks of her life.”

Liv was discharged from the hospital after two nights, according to US vaginal delivery protocols, and planned to visit the NICU daily to feed Flo with breast milk.

However, things took a turn for the worse as Liv herself had to be re-admitted to hospital after suffering “extreme” rib pain as well as a fever.

Liv’s obstetrician ‘told me to just take more Tylenol and call again in the morning’ – but her doula, Andrei, encouraged her to go to the emergency room.

“She took me to the emergency room where they took my pulse and called it ‘sticky’ just like they had with Florence’s first symptoms,” Liv recalled.

Her initial emergency room tests showed a blood infection, so she returned to the hospital, where “all I could explain to the doctors about my symptoms was that I had a fever, headache, postpartum chills, rib pain, and red and painful.’

Twelve hours later, after bringing her fever down with antibiotics, doctors decided to discharge Liv – but she refused, claiming she was “not feeling well at all”.

Her attempts to have a uterine ultrasound were shot down, and she was on the verge of being discharged when test results came back confirming a blood infection – meaning she could now stay in hospital.

As she was ‘relieved’ to stay in the hospital, her emotional state worsened as she was contagious and therefore unable to visit her baby.

One of her ‘best friends’ helped her fall asleep through meditation and she also returned for ‘energy healing’ provided by an acquaintance’s Reiki practitioner.

‘My nervous system is affected. Every time I meditated to relax and began to drift off, I would violently convulse,” she wrote. “I could not breathe properly due to pain in my chest, neck, ribs, shaking, and headache topped off by a mysterious cough. I treated the pain with Tylenol and Ibuprofen which I took every 4-6 hours until the healers stepped in to work on me.’

She began to feel better with the Reiki and was able to clear the blood infection with a course of antibiotics.

“In this 3 week chapter, I am so grateful to be able to walk, pick up my 2.5 year old again, and fully breastfeed,” Liv wrote.

“Healing from childbirth, blood infections, becoming a mother of two and breastfeeding at the same time was an intense experience that reborn me at the same time as my daughter Florence.”

Liv and Henry first met when she approached him at a New Year’s party in 2011 – and four-and-a-half years later, they were married.

In early 2021, when Liv was pregnant with their first child, Henry opened his heart to Us Weekly about the kind of father he hoped to become.

“I want to be a father who is there for them, and when times are hard and things don’t go their way, especially when they live in this day and age, when kids have to be at home and homeschooled, and parents have to they go through real struggles in their business, and maybe in small businesses as well,” he said.

“Keeping that family together and in good spirits, I think that’s a father’s responsibility as well,” mused the Crazy Rich Asians heartthrob.