Sky Sports presenter Simon Thomas has revealed he had previously contemplated suicide after his wife suffered a miscarriage.
The 45-year-old has been detailing how he has been coping following the loss of his wife Gemma to Leukemia in November.
In his latest emotional blog post ‘A Grief Shared’, Mr Thomas has written candidly about his previous battle with depression following his wife’s miscarriage.
He revealed following the birth of his son Ethan in 2009, he and his wife had tried for another baby but their attempts to conceive naturally were unsuccessful.
They decided to opt for IVF, although this failed too, so the couple tried again naturally and were overjoyed when their attempts finally paid off.
Sky Sports presenter Simon Thomas recently revealed he is too heartbroken to return to work following the death of his wife, Gemma (pictured)
However a month after finding out he would be a father for the second time, he awoke to find this wife bleeding and that they had subsequently lost their baby.
This sparked a chain of events which led Mr Thomas to spiral deeper into depression and left him unable to go to work or talk about his feelings when he needed help the most.
Mr Thomas wrote: ‘If the first round was a hammer blow, this was like being hit by a ten tonne truck. Having been given the briefest flicker of hope our dreams of a brother or sister for our boy Ethan were in tatters.’
He wrote: ‘I was starting to struggle to even get out of bed. Some days I just wanted to stay there and never get out of it again – the darkness was closing in.
After months of struggling to come to terms with the miscarriage, Mr Thomas revealed he had reached his lowest point just a few days before Christmas after going out for a drink with friends.
He said: ‘By the time we got to Christmas that year I was in a very bad place.
‘It was like being in a parallel universe – life carries on as normal around you and you’re part of it, yet you feel totally cut off from it. You’re in the world but not of the world.
‘The sounds of my friends talking around me were nothing more than echoes in my head, the music blaring out of the speakers sounded like someone was playing it on an old record player at a slower speed.
‘As we walked home that night I felt like the pit I was in had reached a deeper, more sinister depth. As my friends walked ahead of me a new and frightening thought entered my head – I wanted to end my life.’
He revealed he was able to pull himself out of is depressive state ‘over many weeks of medication, counselling and talking about it with Gemma and close friends’ and that they were ‘at peace’ with the family he had.
Mr Thomas revealed that depression had creeped back into his life in September last year, leaving him struggling to deal with his workload. He had broken down in tears inside a disabled toilet at work before he was due to present the Manchester United against Tottenham game, but that his wife had talked him through it.
‘Darl I know you can do it,’ she told him, ‘God had given you this gift and he won’t let you down. He knows you have the strength to do it, you know you can do it and I know you can do it, now please darl tell Jack your producer how you are feeling.’
Yet just a couple of months later, Thomas was dealt the gut-wrenching news his partner of 16 years had been diagnosed with leukaemia.
Gemma had flu-like symptoms and went to see the doctor three times over the course of six days in November, before she was finally admitted to hospital when her condition continued to deteriorate.
The mother-of-one was suffering from a highly aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia and tragically died three days after her final trip to the GP.
He finished: ‘Now I find myself confused and fearful. I’m grieving my dear wife but at times also questioning where on earth I’m at with all the stuff I had battled with before. I have no idea where I’m at or how I’ll get through this – but all I know is this, as a life long Christian, I don’t pretend to have the answers but what I do have is hope.’
His latest post comes just a week after a video blog, detailing his trouble with sleeping and how a ‘really, really unpleasant episode’ with someone had pushed him ‘to a dark place’.
Speaking to his phone at 4.40am in the morning, he revealed that he had been prescribed sleeping pills in a bid to beat his sleep deprivation.
‘I’m up at this time again, he said. ‘I had a good night sleep the night before. My doctor put me on some new sleeping pills and the first night I got six hours sleep.
‘But I woke up feeling like I had a hangover without being sick. It put me off so I didn’t have them last night and you can’t take them every night.
‘I’ve had one hour sleep and woke up at 3.30am. I know I’m into my 11th week of sleep deprivation.
‘Some of the sleep gurus who have kindly been in touch with lots of suggestions and might suggest some ways around that, but you know there isn’t.
‘I’ve discovered this one of the grim parts of grief. And I don’t fight it, it is what it is. It’s part of it. And I have to get through it. I get up if I can’t sleep any longer.’
Sky Sports presenter Simon Thomas has hinted at a ‘dark situation’ with a person he claims is ‘equating their grief’ with his in a new video blog and the loss of his wife
He then said his son would not be up for another three hours, leaving him unsure whether or not to ‘write, sit here and think or feel sorry for myself’.
In the video, he revealed that he ‘hated’ Fridays and found them the hardest day of the week as it was when he wife died.
He then spoke of a ‘situation’ with another person which escalated yesterday.
‘I can’t really go into it,’ he said. ‘But there’s a situation with a person that’s became really, really unpleasant and they’ve somehow tried to equate their grief with mine.
‘Over the last two weeks it’s been brewing and it reached its breaking point yesterday and pushed me to a really dark place.’
Before his 45th birthday on Friday, Simon said his first birthday without his wife Gemma, pictured, will be the ‘unhappiest of days’ in a heart-wrenching note
Simon writes daily notes for Ethan. One read: ‘My boy- you’re better! Whoopee! Do more today and this week of what makes you awesome! Love you so much, daddy xxx’
Simon announced the devastating news of his wife’s death on Twitter, writing: ‘Today I am crushed with indescribable pain. Just three days after falling ill with acute myeloid leukaemia, my dear wife Gemma passed away yesterday evening surrounded by her family and friends.’
He has since found some solace in raising awareness about the disease, writing in a now viral tweet: ‘Three times my wife Gemma went to the doctor in six days and three times she was sent home and told to rest.
‘Four days after her final visit to her GP she was dead. We have to help and train our GP’s and to detect blood cancer earlier. @bloodwise is doing this. #hiddencancer’.
Simon is now backing a campaign to educate GPs about the disease, encouraging them to take blood tests from suspected sufferers of the disease which affects 2,600 people in Britain a year.
A Just Giving page Simon has set up in wife Gemma Thomas’ name for Maggie’s Centres, a charity which offers support to people affected by cancer, has already raised £13,920 in the last month.
For confidential support in the UK, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see samaritans.org