Prince Harry ate Nando’s chicken and got high on laughing gas to calm his nerves when his son Archie was born.
Meghan ‘bounced into a giant purple ball’ as she went into labor and then slipped into a bath and rattled off ‘soulful hymns’ as Harry lit the room with electric candles and placed a photograph of his late mother, Princess Diana, on a table in the delivery room.
Harry described the extraordinary scene at London’s Portland Hospital in May 2019 when he admitted he “improved” his mood with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, a common pain reliever.
‘Meg was so calm. I was calm too,’ she writes in her memoir.
But I saw two ways to increase my calm. One: Nando’s chicken (brought by our bodyguards). Two: a can of laughing gas at Meg’s bedside. I received several slow penetrating blows.
‘Meg was so calm. I was calm too,’ Harry wrote in Spare’s memoir.
‘Meg, bouncing around on a giant purple ball, a proven way to give Nature a lift, laughed and rolled her eyes. I took several more hits and now I was bouncing too.
She says that when a nurse tried to give Meghan laughing gas from the pain, nothing was left. She describes how the nurse looked at the empty tank and then back at him:
‘I could see the thought slowly dawning. Thank you, the husband has had it all. “Sorry,” I said meekly.
Harry writes that the mood changed when doctors decided to give his wife an epidural to ease her pain: ‘The anesthetist rushed in. The music turned off, and the lights came on. Wow, change of scenery.
After a last-minute concern that the baby might be entangled in his umbilical cord, Archie was unharmed and both parents wept with joy.
