“You have to be strong inside. It’s such a hurdle. It was very much baby steps.”
“The same happened with all of my children.”
Hayley, who starred on Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, has now written a book, Coming Clean: Living With OCD, all about her life living with a consuming and crippling condition.
“I want there to be more awareness of it. When that happened to me in hospital there wasn’t any investigation or anyone saying, ‘This isn’t normal traits of a mum who has just given birth’.
“My illness carried on after that.”
After the birth of her three children, Calum, Diezel and Sienna, Hayley’s cleaning obsession continued.
She’d wash her hands in neat bleach 60 times a day and keep rewashing all of her children’s clothes in the hope of making everything “sterile”.
Then one day her husband Robin dragged her away from bleaching the toilet and she broke down into hysterics. “Rob and I were going to an event at his mum’s house. We were running late as I was cleaning.
“He pulled me away, forcing me away from my ritual and said we needed to go. I started crying in the car, screaming and hitting him, and asking him to go back.