Back from the dead
Rachael Keogh only knew the extent to which she was killing herself when confronted by her mother Lynda.
The evidence of drug abuse was all too apparent. Rachael abused heroin so badly that, when her veins and capillaries could take no more, she just pushed the heroin into open sores in an increasingly desperate attempt to feed her addiction.
The result was black necrosis, which appeared on her arms and ate into her flesh as far as the bone. Already infected, doctors told her she was in serious danger of amputation.
Her mother knew Rachael had a drug problem, but not the extent of which was now so graphically apparent.
"She dragged me into the room and she reefed the cardigan off me and, without being too dramatic, parts of my arms would come off with the cardigan because I wouldn't be able to go up to the clinic and get them dressed because I was so sick," Rachael recalls.
"She took the cardigan off me, and she was roaring crying, and she said: 'Do you realise what you are doing to yourself? Do you realise how beautiful you are; how much potential you have?' It hit me like a ton of bricks."
When Rachael went public with her scarred arms last summer, she did not set out to be a salutary lesson in the ravages of drug addiction or a potential model for drug rehabilitation. She was too busy saving herself to care about others. Her intention was to get help, but if she was going to die of drug addiction, she would make a public show of herself for good or ill.
Her travails over the last eight months have been recorded in a documentary to be broadcast this weekend on Sky News. Documentary maker Alison O'Reilly followed Rachael from her first desperate pleas for help to her emergence last week from Keltoi, the drug rehabilitation unit in the Phoenix Park.
The transformation from the strung-out, skeletal figure which presented itself last summer to the person she is now is remarkable, but, as the documentary demonstrates, it was fraught with difficulty.
It took 14 weeks from the time she sought help to get herself into Cuan Dara, a residential centre in Dublin. The waiting took its toll on her. She spent her 27th birthday in hospital suffering from stress.
Part of Rachael's rehabilitation has been a desire to understand, once and for all, why she became a drug addict. Ostensibly, the reasons are obvious. Her mother was just a teenager when she was born and her father abandoned both of them when they were five. But she was also brought up with a lot of love by her grandparents.
"I turned in on myself. I didn't know how to express what I was feeling," she said.
Rachael rewarded her grandparents' love and affection by robbing them blind to feed her drug habit. When they threw her out of the house, she went to sleep in the dog kennel and then eventually to a filthy, graffiti-strewn Ballymun flat.
"This could have been where my grave was," she says on returning to the flat. Revisiting the places where she sunk so low was part of her attempts to counter the self-destructive urge that made her take drugs in the first place.
At one stage in the documentary, she breaks down when remembering her previous failure to get clean - a four-year stretch at one stage.
"I genuinely wanted to, but I just wasn't ready for it. I have to learn to my love myself and do the right thing by me now, but it's very painful.
"This is why I was afraid to give up the drugs because I knew all this stuff would come up and every time I got clean before, I never connected with all this stuff. I could talk the talk but it was always only on a head level," she says.
This time, though, is different. Her time in Cuan Dara and Keltoi included long periods of personal and group counselling.
"I feel like I've let go of the drug," she says. "The more times go on, the stronger I feel. There's been a major shift for me. I had reservations. I used to say I'd give up drugs when the circumstances are right, but the fear of dying from drugs turned out to be much greater than the fear of living without them."
Right now, her life is full of promise. Keltoi has set her up with her own flat in Smithfield. Next month she appears in a photoshoot in Cosmopolitan magazine - a testimony to her striking good looks and sense of style. She plans to do a degree as a mature student in psychology and politics, and, given her experience of drug rehabilitation, she already has a lifetime's experience of both subjects.
In going public with her travails, she has upped the stakes both for herself and for others who wish to follow her example.
Letting her off with a probation report for a litany of shoplifting offences earlier this month, Judge Cormac Dunne said she had become a "role model for acutely addicted persons".
He said her story was a "happy one", but added the caveat: "let's hope it will have a happy ending". There's no past tense in drug addiction, but the future looks better than it's ever been for Rachael Keogh.
"It's all very surreal. I've never felt so grounded. Everything feels so right," she says. "I feel stronger than I have ever been. It's a privilege to be called a role model. If I could help one person, that would make me happy."
My Heroin Hell: Rachael's Story is on Sky News today at 2pm and 9pm and tomorrow at 3pm.
