A Place In The Sun star Laura Hamilton’s horror bruises from autoimmune disease

As Laura Hamilton stood in the shower looking down at her legs, she knew something was terribly wrong.

Laura, a presenter on Channel 4 show A Place in the Sun, was covered in huge bruises, but had no idea where they’d come from.

“It was terrifying,” she says.

The problem started when her daughter Tahlia was a baby.

“I had been on quite a strict diet,” she says. “I’d cut out sugar and carbs and I was the slimmest I’d been.

“I was ­exercising loads and felt in really good shape.”

Then Laura, who lives with husband Alex and children Rocco, five, and Tahlia, four, started to notice the bruises.

“When Tahlia was about seven months old, I was due to drive to Portugal to film a fitness app, but a few days before I was due to go I started noticing all this bruising coming out on my legs,” she explains.

“At first I wondered if the bruises might have been caused by my diet. I was always someone who bruised quite easily anyway, but it was more than normal.”

In the end, after days of agonising about what the bruises meant, Laura, 38, confided in her mother-in-law.

She guessed it could be a blood disorder and urged Laura to see a doctor – which she did.

“I had a huge bruise under my elbow,” she says. “The doctor was asking where they’d all come from and if I had any recollection of banging myself.

“At the time, I had a seven-month-old baby and a young toddler jumping on me all the time, but even considering that, it was a lot of bruising.”

As her mother-in-law had suspected, the GP also had concerns that Laura might have a blood disorder and sent her to hospital for tests.

While she was waiting, she started looking into her symptoms online and managed to terrify herself even more.

“I did what everyone seems to do and used good old Doctor Google,” she says.

“I started trying to diagnose myself and see what was wrong and it came up with all sorts of scary things.” The hospital had ordered blood tests, and when the results came back, they showed Laura’s blood platelet levels – which help blood to clot and allow wounds to heal – were dangerously low.

A normal platelet count is between 400 and 140 K/uL. Laura’s was only 23.

“The doctor explained that when platelets drop below a certain point, you’re at risk of internal haemorrhaging and bleeding on the brain,” she recalls.

Laura was diagnosed with immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), an autoimmune condition which causes the body to attack its own ­platelets.

At the hospital, doctors asked whether anyone in Laura’s family had any autoimmune diseases, because although the condition itself isn’t ­hereditary, it’s possible to have a genetic predisposition towards such illnesses.

“My mum’s got rheumatoid arthritis and that is also an immune system disorder, which she developed after she had my brother,” she says.

ITP in adults is rare – only around 4,000 people in the UK have the ­condition at any one time.

It can be acute. An attack can come on suddenly. It can be persistent, when the blood platelet count is low for up to three months, or chronic, when the count is low for as long as a year.

Many people have no symptoms, but they can include petechiae – a rash of tiny pinprick red dots – as well as easy bruising, bleeding gums and fatigue. For Laura, the condition was acute and she was told she would need to take a course of steroids to boost her platelet count.

She was relieved the ­diagnosis wasn’t more serious. “It could have been much worse,” she says.

A few days later, Laura had a follow-up appointment and was about to start the course of steroids, but there was a surprise in store for the medics in charge of her care.

“Unbelievably, just as I was due to start the course of steroids, my platelet count started improving by itself and I didn’t end up having to take the ­medication,” she says.

But Laura knows the condition could return any time. “Once you’ve had ITP, it’s always there, so after you’ve had a flare-up it can happen again.”

Autoimmune conditions can be caused by viruses, trauma or stress – although often the cause is unknown.

“I had two small children but I can’t recall one particular stressful situation which triggered it,” says Laura, who now tries to have a slower pace of life. “I thought the ITP coming out was maybe my body’s way of dealing with my busy lifestyle – rather than me having a mental breakdown, it was more of a physical thing,” she says.

But as a busy mum of two, the rest didn’t last long and in recent months her life has been more hectic than ever. Alongside her presenting career, Laura runs a business with her husband.

“We’ve got a coffee shop, deli and restaurant business, so we were delivering fruit and veg to the community during lockdown,” she says. “On top of that, I was home-schooling the kids.”

Filming for A Place in the Sun has also resumed.

“I was due to start filming in Spain but I was on the plane on the way over when it was announced that non-­essential travel was advised against,” she says. “So I’ve now had to relocate to Greece via Amsterdam.”

Four years after her flare-up, Laura is keen to raise awareness of ITP.

“It’s something you don’t even realise can happen – before I was diagnosed, I’d never heard of ITP,” she says.

But if she feels ill, there’s one thing she certainly won’t do again – “I don’t search my symptoms online any more!”

• A Place in the Sun is on Channel 4 at 4pm every day except Saturdays

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