Meg Mansell: The 14-Week Scare, Postpartum Haemorrhage and Living With Debilitating Health Anxiety

This episode contains open discussion about bulimia, disordered eating, body image, pregnancy loss, postpartum haemorrhage, and health anxiety. Please take care if any of these are sensitive topics for you.

Jess sits down with Meg Mansell, beloved New Zealand radio personality from The Edge, mother of two, and as it turns out, Jess's new best friend, for one of the most wide-ranging, raw, and genuinely hilarious conversations The Cyclist has had. They were meant to talk about birth. They talked about everything.

Meg opens up about growing up as a dancer, deeply aware of her body from a very young age, watching the way the world responded to her beautiful mother, feeling the pressure to look the same way, and realising quickly that she hadn't inherited her mum's body. What followed were years of hyperawareness, comparison, and eventually bulimia from around 15 or 16. She speaks honestly about what it's like to carry 36 years of that conditioning while trying to raise daughters differently, telling Daisy her tummy is her favourite part of herself because it made her and her sister, while sitting quietly with the word fraud flashing in her own head.

Then there's Miller's pregnancy, a story that barely exists in the public conversation around pregnancy because it sits in that rare and terrifying 1%. At 14 weeks, Meg woke up covered in blood. She drove herself to hospital alone at 1am while Guy stayed home with Daisy. Blood tests came back showing a dramatic drop in hCG. She and Guy sat in hospital for eight hours grieving a baby they were told they'd lost, making quiet decisions about whether they'd even try again, before a scan revealed a heartbeat. The results had been mixed up with her previous pregnancy. What followed was daily bleeding until 23 weeks, repeated hospital admissions, and a day-by-day pregnancy that somehow made it to 37 weeks.

Miller's birth was its own story entirely. An induced labour, a 30-minute window from five centimetres to birth with no epidural after the anaesthetist couldn't reach her in time, a postpartum haemorrhage of 2.1 litres, emergency surgery, and, in a moment Meg still can't fully explain, convincing the nurses not to tell Guy she was okay so she could roll in and surprise him herself. She has apologised profusely.

They also get into health anxiety, something both Meg and Jess share deeply and personally. Meg describes the particular brand that keeps her awake at night: the constant, exhausting fear that she will miss something and her children will die. The 1am checks. The spiral from a cough to meningococcal. The dog with a bump the vet said was a bug bite that turned out to be cancer. The way being right once makes it impossible to ever believe you might be wrong.

And then Hashimoto's, the autoimmune thyroid condition Meg was eventually diagnosed with after months of blaming herself for her own exhaustion, bone aches, and weight changes. A female doctor who pushed for bloods. A 9am phone call the next morning asking her to come in. Antibodies hundreds of times above normal range.

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Hit play. And maybe clear your afternoon.