Marian Keyes

Marian Keyes

On Monday morning, 17 January 1994, I awoke in my flat in Maida Vale in London.

I’d had a terrible weekend, which had been spent drinking and contemplating suicide. Now it was Monday morning and I was deep in the horrors. My friends and colleagues had been telling me for some time that I was an alcoholic and that I needed help. But they were wrong. I was simply depressed and alcohol wasn’t my problem, instead it was the solution.

However, on this grey January morning, I understood intuitively that alcohol was making me miserable, that it had stopped all forward propulsion in my life and it ruined anything good and decent.

I needed to stop. But I knew couldn’t. Suspended between those two impossible extremes – keep drinking/stop drinking – it was clear that I couldn’t keep on living. There were sleeping tablets in my bedroom, and some antidepressants. I took them all and waited to die.

As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I wondered if there was any other way of approaching this? So I rang a friend, who rang an ambulance, which arrived a short time later.

I remember the paramedics, two men, friendly and brisk. Cheery, even. Strapping a woman into a stretcher before 8am on Monday morning seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary for them.

They took me to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington where I was seen right away. Instead of having to have my stomach pumped, I was fed activated charcoal, which – I subsequently discovered – is how most overdoses are treated.

There are many people who think that taking an overdose is an act of self-indulgence, but none of the staff at St Mary’s seemed to think that way: they were so incredibly kind to me.

The act that I remember with the most gratitude is when my poor mother rang from Ireland. These were the days before mobile phones so the nurses let me use the phone on their desk to console my devastated mother. Somebody got me a chair to sit on and everyone continued working all around me as I let myself be persuaded to go to rehab.

The following day, I flew back to Ireland and two days later checked into a treatment centre. I haven’t had a drink since.

Because of the way I’d been living, if there had been a cost for calling an ambulance, I wouldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have afforded it. I would have let myself die. Likewise, with the hospital care.

Three months later, I returned to London and was able to restart my life, living in a better, healthier way.

I’m so profoundly grateful to the NHS for saving my life and doing it with such compassion and kindness.

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