DIE

SITTING in her car outside the hospital, Talia Oatway looks exhausted – her son Oakley is once again being treated, and this time the news is more terrifying than ever before.

The single mum-of-four and ex-partner of Geordie Shore star Aaron Chalmers may be drained, but as she tells The Sun all about her three-year-old’s diagnosis, she appears determined and ready to fight for his life.

Little Oakley was born with Apert syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes fusion of the skull, hands, and feet bones. At just three years old, he’s already been put under general anaesthetics 19 times, and last week, devastated Talia, 31, was told there is yet another issue he has to contend with – and this time it’s life-threatening hydrocephalus. 

Last year, Oakley ended up in a coma after complications during a planned operation on his skull. While initially, Talia expected him to be in hospital for five days, she ended up uprooting her life for seven weeks to be by his side.

Oakley has been living with just half his skull since then, after surgeons deemed it too dangerous to try to replace it.

Once they finally returned home, Talia soon realised something wasn’t right, but she wasn’t prepared for just how hard everything was about to become.

You don’t understand the pressure I’m under. At home, even when he’s well, you’re still looking for signs, thinking, ‘Is something going to happen?’

Talia on being a medical mum

She explains: “Since that admission, we’ve been back and forth with hospitals and coming to A&E because he kept vomiting non-stop to the point where he was getting too dehydrated and needed a drip. 

“Then he got diagnosed with something called CVS – cyclic vomiting syndrome. He gets migraines, then he starts projectile vomiting. And that was because he got meningitis last year. It triggered a neurological condition.”

Oakley was given medication, but wasn’t responding – concerned doctors rushed him in for a CT scan, where they discovered he had a condition called hydrocephalus, which is a build-up of fluid on the brain. 

Talia tells The Sun: “The CT scan also showed that he had a bit of brain damage at the front of the brain from the meningitis last year.

“It also showed that his forehead they’d rebuilt was absorbing a percentage of the bone.

“So he’s actually got less bone from last year when they removed part of it because his body was absorbing part of it because of the fluid.”

Doctors have now fitted a shunt in Oakley’s brain to drain the fluid, and he is being monitored in hospital to see how his body will react.

Fighting back tears, Talia says: “There’s a lot of stress around being vigilant with Oakley’s care, acting on instinct, acting on signs that he shows.

“But Oakley’s non-verbal. So it’s not as if he can say, ‘I’ve got a headache and I’m about to be sick’, or, ‘I feel dizzy’.

“The two conditions he’s got are exactly the same symptoms. However, one of them can be life-threatening if it’s not treated when it needs to be treated.”

Talia, who has made a name for herself online as a ‘medical mum’ influencer, has taken a step back from social media as she comes to terms with the latest development.

‘I don’t like to air dirty laundry’

She first became known when she started dating Geordie Shore star Aaron in 2017.

The pair had a whirlwind romance and welcomed three children in quick succession –  Romeo, five, Maddox, four, and Oakley.

Speaking about the start of their relationship, she reveals:  “We always wanted a big family. This sounds really cringe, but I love being a mum.

“I love being pregnant. I loved having the babies and the routine and the whole mum thing. I absolutely loved that. And I still love it.”

During her pregnancy with Oakley, doctors flagged that there could be an issue – she had two MRIs but was discharged from foetal medicine and was told everything was fine.

She says: “So when Oakley was born, obviously it was a shock.”

Asked when the true extent of his issues dawned on her, Talia says: “I don’t think it truly hit me until Oakley was about three months old when he was bouncing in and out of hospital.”

The pressure became too much, and Aaron made the decision that the relationship was over.

Asked about their split, she says: “I think the pressures of what comes with being a medical family, your priorities change. And the pressures that come with it are a lot. Speaking with other medical families, it takes a very, very strong couple to survive a relationship.

“Trauma, as in what your child goes through, the constant hospital stays, all of that sort of stuff… that’s just the way it went.”

Since their split, Aaron has hit out at Talia on a number of occasions, but she has mostly kept a dignified silence.

Last week, though, things reached boiling point, with the struggling mum admitting: “I do solo parent two of my children. Oakley’s here every single night, he has been for over a year, and the fact that this person can just go online and start talking about his medical care when he doesn’t attend any appointments, doesn’t attend hospital, is mind-blowing.” 

But having time to calm down, she adds: “I don’t like to air dirty laundry. I think my kids will grow up, and once things are on the internet, they will stay on the internet, and I’ve always been mindful of that.”

‘I got dealt these cards’

Asked how she is coping with it all, Talia explains: “I’ve had no option but to just put my big girl pants on and learn for my son.

“I got dealt these cards and I’ve got to deal with it and make sure my son’s always being cared for, always safe.

“I’m his advocate because he doesn’t speak. I say all the time, you don’t understand the pressure I’m under. At home, even when he’s well, you’re still looking for signs, thinking, ‘Is something going to happen?’, you’re waiting for the next thing.”

Oakley sleeps with the help of ventilation at home and uses oxygen when he’s unwell – he has a tube in his nose, which is seven centimetres long, to keep his airway open. Talia explains: “If that tube comes out, you’ve got to straightaway put that back in because that’s his breathing support.”

Talia is full of praise for the NHS, as well as Oakley’s lead respiratory consultant, who she describes as “amazing”.

She’s also seeing a psychologist once a week to help her process what is going on.

Talia won’t let herself think about a worst-case scenario.

Looking to the future, the mum is cautious and tells me: “I just want things to calm down for him. Have some time at home without hospital admissions, and enjoy being a child.

“I feel like he’s not really had that time to have that, because it has been quite a lot of hospital admissions – whether that’s an operation, a CT scan, lumbar drains, he’s had a lot of things done to him.”

In the meantime, Talia is enjoying the special little moments with her boy – and despite him being non-verbal, he has developed his own form of communication.

She says: “Affection is not very much at the moment because he’s also got a global developmental delay as well. But like I can say, ‘OK, can I have a kiss? Can I have a kiss?’

“Because he wears hearing aids, too, he still can hear a little bit. And he will give me a kiss, or I say, I’ll cuddle, and then I’ll pick him up, and he knows.

“It makes me appreciate things a lot more when he does do it, because it isn’t often.”

As the interview comes to an end, Talia heads back inside the hospital, and it’s clear that behind the social media persona is an incredibly strong, brave and caring woman doing it all on her own.

The first shot of director Lynne Ramsay’s stubborn and exasperating postpartum nightmare “Die My Love” would be a great opener for a horror movie. The camera lurks in the kitchen of an isolated ranch house, as still and foreboding as a ghost, while a couple named Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) poke around the front porch of their newly inherited property. The two take several beats to go inside, long enough that we suspect these crazy kids are making a dangerous mistake. Just look at the wallpaper. Those florals would make anyone crack.

“It’s not New York but it’s ours,” Jackson says of the rural home, left to him by his uncle who died violently upstairs in a way that Grace finds hilarious. He grew up in the area and his parents, Pam and Harry (Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte), still live nearby. Neither Jackson nor Grace say anything about their past lives back in the city, but he yearns to play drums and she once claimed to write. There’s a sense that their dreams have stalled out, either due to finances, passion or talent. So they move in, have a baby and pivot to domestic chaos.

• Share via Close extra sharing options

Lawrence and Pattinson are such a natural, overdue pairing that it’s a surprise to realize this is the first time they’ve teamed up to make the kind of polarizing, go-for-broke prestige film they both enjoy. The two stars launched into the public consciousness roughly around the same time, then followed the same trajectory from teen franchise idols to creatively ambitious A-listers and now, more recently, newish parents making a movie about miserable parents whose hopes have run aground. Lawrence has two tots under 3; Pattinson, a toddler. Their kids shouldn’t watch this movie until college.

In a dynamic montage, Ramsay sets up their boyfriend-girlfriend pair as lusty but strange. Jackson and Grace flirt by fighting like wild beasts. Nuzzling, sniffing, biting, wrestling — that’s foreplay (and she’s more into it than he is). But they can’t communicate with words. “If you’re not feeling good, maybe we should, like … talk?” Jackson says tentatively to his increasingly restless and unstable partner. Grace isn’t interested in talking, though occasionally she’s game to scream. When they fight for real, their bodies twist into spasms of outrage. And when the other one isn’t looking, each seems to power down — Lawrence’s Grace physically collapsing like an unplugged air dancer — a clue of how much energy they must privately expend to make it work.

“Die My Love,” adapted by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch from the 2012 novel by Argentine author Ariana Harwicz, makes parenthood feel like being handcuffed to an anchor that’s sinking into a swamp. Lawrence’s Grace needs help and the more she flails, the worse she makes things. The book is an inner monologue of poison: “How could a weak, perverse woman like me, someone who dreams of a knife in her hand, be the mother and wife of those two individuals?” the first paragraph seethes. But Ramsay rejects putting its angst into words. As with Joaquin Phoenix in “You Were Never Really Here,” she prefers characters who silently roil under their skin.

The tension in this home starts quiet — too quiet — with Grace cranking up kiddie albums by Alvin and the Chipmunks and Raffi to drown out whatever noise is happening in her head. After Jackson brings home a stray dog, the racket becomes unbearable, with sound designers Tim Burns and Paul Davies skillfully and cruelly making sure that no matter how far Grace roams, she can still hear the darned thing bark.

Lacking much perspective into Grace, we mostly see a mentally unwell woman incensed that her sexual playtime is over. She howls with the urge to mate, prowling the house in matching fancy bras and thong sets that clash with this disheveled house and its stockpile of cheap beer. Occasionally, a mysterious leather-clad biker (LaKeith Stanfield) speeds by, considering a quickie with this bored beauty.

Grace’s erotic agony is reductive and a bit ridiculous, although I think the script is also trying to imply that Grace herself is focused on the wrong problems. The film represents her depression by coating the night scenes in so much blue tint that even Picasso might suggest dialing it back. Despite cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s efforts to put us in her headspace with lenses that make the world blur and swirl around her, you’re more afraid of Grace than for Grace, especially when the shock editing has her smashing through doors like Michael Myers.

Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.

Yet, this is a character who hates pity and I can’t help but admire that Ramsay faces down today’s phonily upbeat and relatable motherhood discourse with this boogey-mom who keeps herself aloof. Grace treats the older women in her family like a wall of advice to be tuned out even when they’re right. “Everybody goes a little loopy the first year,” Spacek’s Pam says, offering empathy that falls on deaf ears. (Spacek delivers a lovely, endearingly layered turn.) And while Grace is so lonely she literally claws the walls, she rejects any overture of friendship, either from a perky fellow parent (Sarah Lind) or a peppy cashier (Saylor McPherson) whose attempts to start a conversation go so badly that when the poor dear asks Grace if she’s found everything she’s looking for, Grace huffs, “In life?”

Pattinson has the more recessive role but his performance is so subtle and clever that it’s worth watching closely. His Jackson is pathetic, passive and skittish around his baby’s mother, who he both longs to heal and tries to avoid. He has a few moments that play so close to comedy — say, whining to be let into the bathroom — that you wish the movie would do more to encourage our pained, guttural laughs. The punchlines are there, such as a beat after one meltdown where Jackson admits he’s getting really stressed out and Grace coolly replies, “About what?”

There’s one scene in which Grace reveals a snippet of backstory that might explain her psychology, and I think that specificity is a narrative misstep. What’s powerful about Grace is that she’s howling for all parents, even the mostly happy ones. Harwicz’s book deliberately never gave her character a name.

Even inside this movie, Grace’s anguish is universal. Yes, she wanders into the wilderness at night, but so do her in-laws Harry and Pam, for reasons of their own.There are dark vibrations emanating from almost every character, even the minor ones, although Grace is too caught up in herself to take any comfort from that. But Ramsay is comfortable suggesting that everyone feels crazy and miserable. I suspect she thinks it’s the most normal way to live.