Rachael Keogh - Dying to Survive: Rachaels Story

To the two angels in my life:
Senn and my grandmother, Theresa Keogh

Rachael Keogh is a thirty-three-year-old Dubliner, the mother of a little boy, and a student.

The unexamined life is not worth living

SOCRATES

• News from a New Republic: Ireland in the 1950s Tom Garvin
  
• King Dan: The Rise of Daniel OConnell, 17751829 Patrick M. Geoghegan
  
• Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel OConnell, 18301847 Patrick M.Geoghegan
• The Bombing of Dublin's North Strand,1941: The Untold Story Kevin C. Kearns
  
• The Reluctant Taoiseach: A Biography of John A. Costello David McCullagh
  
• The Plantation of Ulster Jonathan Bardon
  
• Enigma: A New Life of Charles Stewart Parnell Paul Bew
  
• Ireland's Arctic Siege: The Big Freeze of 1947 Kevin C. Kearns
  
• A City in Wartime: Dublin 19141918 Pdraig Yeates
  
• The Western Front: Irish Voices from the Great War William Sheehan
  
• Funding the Nation: Money and Nationalist Politics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland Michael Keyes
• The Year of Disappearances: Political Killings in Cork, 19211922 Gerard Murphy
  

• The End of the Party: How Fianna Fil Lost its Grip on Power Bruce Arnold and Jason OToole
  
• Bertie: Power and Money Colm Keena
  
• Fianna Fil: A Biography of the Party Noel Whelan
  

• Dying to Survive Rachael Keogh
  
• Little Fighters: The Million-to-One Miracles Angie Benhaffaf
  
• Buen Camino! A FatherDaughter Journey from Croagh Patrick to Santiago deCompostela Natasha and Peter Murtagh
• Let This Be Our Secret: The Shocking True Story Of A Killer Dentist, His Mistress, How They Murdered Their Spouses And How They Almost Got Away With It Deric Henderson
  
• A Parish Far From Home Philip OConnor
  

• The Courage to Be Happy: A New Approach to Well-Being in Everyday Life Colm OConnor
• The Survivors Mindset: Kick-start your health with the power of your mind and body Bernadette Bohan
• The Choice: The true story of a mothers triumph over cancer Bernadette Bohan
  

• Words We Don't Use (Much Anymore) Diarmaid Muirithe
  
• The Money Doctor Finance Annual John Lowe
  

• Rowdy Rhymes and Rec-im-itations Vincent Caprani
  
• Short Back and Sides: Tales From An Irish Barber Shop Peter Quinn
  

My name is Rachael. Im smartly dressed, a college student and the mother of a gorgeous baby boy. I have everything I want in life: work I like, the support of my family and friends, my son. Im a normal twenty-nine-year-old, but Im also a recovering heroin addict.

For fourteen years, beginning at the tender age of eleven, I put every drug I could think of inside my body: starting at teenage raves with hash and E, moving on to other pills such as Napps and benzodiazepines, then to smoking heroin and then to injecting it. To fund my drug addiction I did everything imaginable: I broke into houses, shop-lifted and stole from my own family, and I did other things of which Im so ashamed I have difficulty even thinking about them now.

It would be easy to say that I took drugs because everyone else did. After all, I grew up in Ballymun when drug addiction was rife in the high-rise blocks. Many of my friends took drugs: some only occasionally, others became full-blown addicts like me, spiralling downwards into crime, ill-health and worse. But really, I took drugs to hide my anger at the family I felt had abandoned me and at the emptiness I felt inside, which only drugs seemed to fill. This anger took me to some dark places: to drug squats, to shared needles, to every garda station in the city, in and out of court, and to Mountjoy prison; it took me to nasty people who did me no good and to a side of life no-one should have to experience. My attempts to run from my past took me far away from Ireland and urged me to take solace in whatever I could find to fill the void, even God and prayer.

I sincerely tried to stop taking drugs: I went to detox after detox, had several stints in rehab, none of which managed to break the hold which drugs had over me. It was only when I came to terms with the pain and hurt Id been running from for so long and accepted just how far I was willing to go to avoid it, that I could even begin to think about my addiction and what it meant to me. And even then I had to be literally at deaths door, very little time left to live, my arms mutilated, my lungs clogged with residual heroin, my fingers clubbed from the poor circulation caused by drug use, and with hepatitis C. Only then did I decide that enough was enough.

And then, my prayers were answered. I found a source of comfort and support in Narcotics Anonymous and in their daily meetings, where I met others just like me or who had travelled the road before me, who accepted me and didnt judge me. I found a rehabilitation centre where, in a gentle and non-judgmental environment, I learned to conquer my demons. I learned to find hope in small things, in the mundanity of everyday life, in the little routines which I had shunned for so long. I came to realise that it wasnt the drugs that were holding me back in a life I had come to hateit was me, and only I could change things.

I used to wonder how on earth people could cope with life without drugs and now I know. Life has given me so much since I stopped taking heroin. I stuck with the rehab and remained clean far longer than the six months which I had managed before. I managed to repair my relationship with my family, to build bridges with those I had hurt so badly and who had hurt me in turn. I learned to forgive myself for the past, to love myself. And life seemed to answer me by offering me new friends, new opportunities and the gift of a beautiful baby boy.

Whilst I was at my worst, the media offered me a lifeline and I found myself and my story splashed over the front pages and on the television. I became notorious, as the girl with the arms. Sure, I told them my story for a reason: because I wanted to get clean and could think of no other way, and because I wanted to show just how bad services are for drug users in this country. The reason I have written this book is the same in some waysI hope that in reading my story, those who know drug users, their family and friends, who despair of ever seeing them recover, will know that there is hope and that the powerlessness they feel about their loved ones addiction is normal. Addicts choose to take that first drug, and only the addict him or herself can walk away. But I have also written my story for other reasons: to understand why I became an addict, to forgive myself and my family and to close this chapter in my life, once and for all. To move on, with my son, to a future I thought Id never see.

Rachael Keogh

13 March 2009

Chapter 1

I t was a race against the clock, as I could already feel the sickness kicking in. Although I was sweating, what felt like a layer of frost was starting to form down my back. I couldnt allow myself to think about the sickness, though. All I could think about was getting the money and getting the gear.