I Turned to Alcohol and Cocaine After Nearly Dying in Childbirth

Once my three children were settled in bed, I quietly went to my eldest son’s money box and removed £50.

I told myself the cash was needed for something important. But I wasn’t buying him a Nerf blaster, Lego or another birthday treat.

I used it to buy cocaine for myself. While my children slept upstairs, I drank alone and took line after line.

Was stealing my nine-year-old son’s birthday money to fund my drug habit the lowest point of my addiction?

I wish that had been the worst of it. My dependence on alcohol and cocaine continued to spiral before I finally asked for help. To anyone who saw me dropping the children at school, my hidden life would have seemed impossible. I had a comfortable home, a career, a devoted husband and an Instagram feed packed with cheerful family snapshots.

In private, though, I had been trapped in a damaging cycle since almost dying while giving birth to my youngest child.

Overwhelmed by terrifying flashbacks of the traumatic delivery and the anxiety that followed, I turned to alcohol and drugs to block it all out. I would wait until my husband Chris and the children were asleep, then creep downstairs and use them in secret.

There is no excuse for drinking heavily or taking drugs while caring for children. But childbirth can leave women with profound physical and psychological trauma. This year, Baroness Amos’s review of NHS maternity care in England highlighted how women and babies are being failed “on a scale that shames our society”.

There have also been several high-profile cases in which hospital trusts were found to have repeatedly failed women in their care.

And sometimes, despite the best efforts of medical staff, events simply take a devastating turn. That was what happened to me.

Childbirth remains dangerous, even in an era of advanced medicine. One recent study linked the trauma of labour to falling birth rates in the UK. Another suggests that birth-related PTSD goes undiagnosed in around 15,000 women each year. When this serious condition is missed, it can contribute to damaged relationships, years of distress and a heightened risk of suicide.

I never reached the point of considering suicide, but the trauma of my delivery changed me deeply and affected Chris and our children too.

Before that, I had always seen myself as someone who drank socially. After a demanding or stressful day, I looked forward to “wine o’clock” — perhaps a glass with Chris at home or a drink while meeting friends. If I was with my group of mum friends near our Essex home and someone offered me alcohol, I would rarely turn it down.

Looking back, there were signs that my drinking was becoming less ordinary. I was frequently the last person still drinking, but I dismissed it as part of my all-or-nothing nature.

In 2019, when I was 32 and found out I was pregnant with our third child, I largely gave up alcohol apart from the occasional small glass of wine. My focus was on preparing to welcome another baby.

During my first pregnancy, I had suffered a placental abruption at 33 weeks. The placenta partially detached from the wall of my uterus, and although I had a vaginal delivery, my son Teddy arrived prematurely. Two years later, I feared the same complication during my pregnancy with my daughter. Doctors were not alarmed, and the birth went smoothly.

By the time I became pregnant for the third time, I felt confident that everything would be fine.

But at 32 weeks, I was lying in bed watching a film with Teddy, then six, and Nancy, four, when I felt a gush. I put my hand down and realised it was blood. Chris called for help while I struggled downstairs, ending up sprawled across the loo and hallway floors, with more and more blood pouring out of me.

When the paramedics arrived minutes later, I knew it was bad from their shocked faces. My mother-in-law came to look after the children and I said goodbye to them, doing everything I could not to cry and look as though I was OK. But as I was put into the ambulance I wondered when, or even if, I would see them again.

Blue-lighted to hospital, I was wheeled into a room of medics. Chris wasn’t allowed to stay, leaving me scared and alone.

Then, as two doctors argued about whether I needed an emergency caesarean, there was another surge of blood. All the medics gasped and I remember thinking how serious it must be as I was rushed straight into theatre.

Midwives desperately scanned my bump looking for a heartbeat, then shook their heads. I was terrified my baby had died.

And when I asked a nurse, ‘Am I going to die?’, she stuttered, unable to answer. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing it all to be over. Then everything went black.

Twelve hours later, I woke up in intensive care unable to speak because of a breathing tube inserted into my throat.

I was still wired up to machines, weak and emotionally broken. I had survived – but had my baby?

A nurse appeared and told me Chris had been there but was with the baby now and I remember deciding that he must at least be alive, before drifting back to sleep.

Later, when I came round again, Chris gave me a pen and paper, and tearfully I wrote: ‘They said he was dead. I thought I was going to die. Please don’t leave me.’

He told me that our son had needed to be resuscitated before he was transferred to another hospital for specialist care. He would need to remain in hospital for monitoring because he was premature but, amazingly, had suffered no serious complications, only jaundice.

Doctors explained that my placenta had completely detached from my uterus, causing me to lose 4.5 litres of blood – almost the entire blood volume of an average adult.

They told me I was lucky to be alive and that if I hadn’t reached hospital so quickly neither of us would have made it. I was left in a state of disbelief.

After a day on the ICU, I was moved to a high-dependency ward. Five days later, even though doctors wanted me to stay in, I discharged myself so Chris could take me to finally meet our baby.

I’d been worrying about whether I’d feel a connection but as soon as I held him, I was overwhelmed with love. We named him Vinny. He came home after a month in hospital, just two weeks before lockdown.

But having come terrifyingly close to death, I struggled to cope and the days blurred into one another as I recovered from surgery and adjusted to life with a newborn.

Because of the pandemic, there were fewer support services, no mother and baby groups, and fewer opportunities to get support from our family.

Chris was always there for me to talk to but I just couldn’t bring myself to discuss what had happened. Yet a passing ambulance siren could trigger a panic attack and I became fixated on the amount of blood I’d lost. I felt permanently on edge.

Every time I saw a bottle or container, I would check its capacity and compare it with the 4.5 litres of blood I’d lost, as though I needed to keep reminding myself of the enormity of what had happened.

I was referred for cognitive behavioural therapy over Zoom and had three sessions, which helped ease my constant anxiety a little. But then I discovered something far more effective. When Vinny was a few months old, I sat down and poured myself a glass of wine, then another, noticing how it quietened the noise in my head.

Finding ways to keep that feeling going became my priority, which was why, soon after, I found myself moving onto cocaine. I’d used it occasionally in the past, socially, but now it served a different purpose – numbing every thought.

It seems drastic to need both drink and drugs but it felt necessary under the circumstances.

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It was the only way to shut off the flashbacks.

Using also helped me stop frantically Googling illnesses in the middle of the night – I was anxious about every little symptom either myself or the children showed – or panicking every time I used the downstairs bathroom.

Whenever I went in there, I was back lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

With no school runs, routine or structure, I convinced myself that the usual rules of everyday life no longer applied. Hangovers didn’t matter as much if you couldn’t go to work.

I could drink two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc most days, or cocktails or gin and tonics. With Chris and the children asleep upstairs, sometimes I would even raid the cupboards for leftover mulled wine, just to stay numb.

As restrictions eased, I surrounded myself with mums who also enjoyed a drink and started going to their houses after the school run. When it got dark, the kids would ask to go home but I’d tell them I needed ‘mummy time’. Sometimes we wouldn’t get home until the early hours, once I’d sobered up, with them having eaten little more than a Babybel and a Peperami.

The children saw me drinking but I made sure they never saw me taking drugs. And while they were awake at least, I would try to maintain a semblance of control.

Somehow, I convinced myself I was a good mum, even as I stole their birthday money to fund my habit. The children were doing well at school, so I told myself they couldn’t be suffering.

But on sports day, I hid Sauvignon Blanc in a tumbler and sipped it as I cheered the children on in their races.

And ahead of one parents’ evening, I even took a line of cocaine at home before sitting opposite the teacher, nodding along to their comments about my children’s progress while enjoying the high.

I’d become so dependent on cocaine that I couldn’t understand how other people managed to clean the house without a line.

While I tried to hide the drug- taking, Chris knew I was drinking too much and had made the odd comment but we’d always been a sociable couple so I don’t think he realised the full extent of my habit. He was also often busy with his job as a steel fabricator. When Vinny was two I went back to work, part-time, in a cafe. But there was very little responsibility and I could get away with turning up hungover.

I also completed a laser hair removal course and was building up my own business; holding down two jobs was another reason I persuaded myself I didn’t have a problem.

The physical effects became harder to ignore though. I gained weight, my skin was sallow and I had permanent dark circles under my eyes.

The drugs also gave me chest pains and painful mouth ulcers. But the physical discomfort was somehow easier to cope with than the mental turmoil that the cocaine numbed.

Teddy was also beginning to notice the change in me. I would take him to football training on a Saturday morning absolutely shattered and I constantly broke promises to take him on days out.

My marriage was suffering, too. Chris tried his best to talk to me but I didn’t have the capacity to listen, let alone consider changing. Sometimes, I would deliberately start arguments so I had an excuse to walk out for a bit.

When Vinny was five, I told myself the trauma of his birth should have faded by now but the reality was I felt worse than ever. I wanted to stop abusing my body and tried Sober October and Dry January, white-knuckling my way through for a week or two, before giving up.

The turning point came in March 2025, when I went to collect the children from a friend’s house on a Thursday afternoon.

She asked whether I fancied tea or wine and before I’d even chosen, I knew how things would pan out.

Come evening, the kids were desperate for bed but, as always, I brushed them off, making them feel as though they were the problem. Finally Teddy, then ten, turned to me with tears in his eyes and asked: ‘Mum, why have you done this again?’

He looked frightened, angry and disappointed, and I couldn’t give him an answer. That was the moment I knew I had to change.

Once we were home, I put the children to bed and in the early hours of the morning searched online for Cocaine Anonymous. By some miracle, there was a meeting down the road the same day.

I hadn’t slept or showered, had make-up smeared across my face and was crying when I dragged myself into the meeting room.

It was a shock. I had imagined everyone else would look worse off than me – scruffy and miserable. Instead, they all looked happy and well, wearing new trainers and arriving in Range Rovers.

It was impossible to imagine these people – many of them fellow parents – had ever been as low as me but as they started sharing their stories, I recognised myself in their experiences. Saying out loud that I was an ‘addict’ was so hard.

In my mind I was a strong woman with three children, two jobs and was running a house. But I admitted I’d put my children in some terrible situations and was terrified of being judged – or even losing them.

I confessed that I couldn’t imagine life without alcohol or drugs – and that part of me didn’t want to. That for five years, they had been my emotional crutches.

Thankfully, the worst, most humiliating moment of my life became the best thing I ever did.

From that day on, I didn’t touch cocaine or alcohol. I attended regular meetings and unpacked the trauma I’d spent years suppressing. Each week at Cocaine Anonymous I collected a milestone chip to mark my progress. When I received my 30-day chip, I was incredibly proud.

While I confided in Chris about what I’d been doing all these years, he was understandably angry and concerned. We struggled for a while.

But six months after I stopped drinking he gave up alcohol too in order to support me, a gesture that meant a lot to me and which has helped our marriage tenfold.

Recovery has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Alcohol is so ubiquitous in our social culture that I had to distance myself from friends and stop going to birthday parties, barbecues, weddings, even funerals.

Instead I surrounded myself with like-minded people and was careful with everything I put into my body, including painkillers and Red Bull, wary even they might give me a ‘high’ and affect my recovery.

Now 38, I’m 19 months sober and am finally able to be the mother my children – now 12, ten and six – deserve.

I’ve also lost 2st and look and feel a million times better.

Addiction doesn’t always mean drinking from a paper bag on a park bench or lying on the floor with a needle in your arm.

Nor does it always mean pouring a glass of wine at breakfast or drinking to excess every single day. That was part of my struggle in recognising what I’d become.

I was an addict but I was still paying the mortgage, putting on make-up and, superficially anyway, looked like a mum who had it all together.

But in reality, I was falling apart. And I’m sadly aware that many more women will still be facing their own mental health battles in the wake of birth and pregnancy trauma.

It’s a bleak reminder that one of the most ‘natural’ things a woman can do can have a devastating impact on your life.

As told to JULIA SIDWELL