Lucy is someone I met 6 months ago and we worked together to help her back to better health. She is a true inspiration to me, so I thought I’d share her story, in her own words.. (with help from Alice Ryan of The Cambridge Evening News)
‘HUNCHED naked on the floor, sobbing and dripping with sweat, Lucy Petitt knew she couldn’t go on.’
A chronic alcoholic – who downed two bottles of vodka a day – she’d seen her own father drink himself to death. And now, aged just 26, Lucy realised she was fast heading the same way.
“I realised I’d repeated history, that I was going to end up just like my dad – in a pool of my own blood and vomit,” admits Lucy. “I sat there and contemplated suicide.
“I was covered in alcohol sweat and I was sobbing: ‘Please help me.’ I drank a whole bottle of vodka, but even that wasn’t enough to numb the pain. And then I blacked out.
“I woke up three hours later, still lying, foetal, on the rug. I looked around and the duvet was disgusting, the room was disgusting; it was like living in a squat. I’d completely let everything go. I didn’t even wash.
“And that’s when I went to the doctor and said: ‘I want to stop drinking.’”
That was November 23, 2006. It’s a date which is stamped forever in Lucy’s memory – because she hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since.
To see her now, a slim, glamorous and outgoing young woman, it’s clear she’s been on an awe-inspiring journey. “I don’t even look like the same person. Back then I looked like a Ribena berry: my eyes were yellow and my face was purple,” she says, with a giggle. “I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was far from funny.”
“When you are broken, and you really hit rock bottom, the only way is up,” explains the mum-of-one. “It’s a case of sink or swim: I could either die like my dad or choose life. I chose life, and I absolutely love it.”
Lucy, who was born in Cambridge, had what appeared, from the outside, to be a privileged childhood. “Actually it was hell,” she says, ever matter-of-fact. “My father was what they call a high-functioning alcoholic, which meant he could maintain a good job. So we had the luxuries, the lifestyle: the house, the car, the money, the holidays. We had all the surface stuff that makes you look like a normal family.”
But, behind closed doors, the family was anything but normal. “My father drank constantly,” remembers Lucy. “And he was physically violent.
On one occasion I broke his thumb. I was only a little girl, but he was attacking my mum so I had a go at him. He’d put his briefcase through the tropical fish tank
. . . Life was like that, really.”
By the time Lucy reached her early teens, her dad’s drinking had spiralled out of all control. “We lost the house,” she explains. “My mum and I were homeless; we spent six months living in hostels or sleeping in the car. Looking back, it was a nightmare.”
Badly bullied at school, Lucy describes herself as “the fat, ugly kid”. Developing an eating disorder, aged 13 she also started self-harming; rolling back her sleeve, Lucy reveals rows of deep scars along her arm. “I was self-harming between the ages of 13 and 17,” she adds. “So those scars are 10 years old now.”
On leaving school, Lucy got a job as a trainee chef. And that’s when she first discovered alcohol for herself – while working in the kitchen. “It started as a social thing,” she remembers. “I was drinking with friends, going out with the girls, the normal thing. And I had a whale of a time.”
Living in a sheltered flat, provided by the homeless charity Wintercomfort, her dad was now critically ill. “He was on three bottles of vodka a day,” says Lucy. “He was absolutely pickled.”
Lucy’s dad had lost all feeling in his hands and feet to an alcohol-induced condition called neuritis. His throat, ravaged by years of drinking neat spirits, had begun to collapse. And his liver was failing.
“I can still remember the smell of his empty bottles,” says Lucy, with a wince. “He was literally rotting internally; you could smell death on him.”
Despite their fraught relationship, Lucy nursed her father. “I shaved him, helped him walk in a Zimmer frame,” she recalls. “Whatever else, he was an incredible character, my dad. In the end, he choked on his own blood and vomit. And his liver packed up. Everything packed up. He was in his 40s.
“I believe that alcoholism is inherited, that it’s a disease. I think it was always there in me. And it took me going through it myself to realise how he suffered, mentally and physically. I had to go to hell and back myself to forgive my father, and I have.”
When, aged 18, Lucy gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, it should have been the happiest day of her life. But, while she was cuddling her newborn daughter, Lucy got the inevitable news – that her father had died.
“I drank a bottle of Martini,” says Lucy, sadly. “His demise was the start.”
For the first 18 months, Lucy managed to care for her little girl. But, often drinking in secret, she soon realised she had a serious drink problem. “I knew at 22 that I was an alcoholic,” she explains.
“I was a bad mum at that time. I hold my hands up and say I wasn’t there for my daughter then. And that’s why I’d go to the ends of the earth for her now.
“Now I’m sober we’ve completely rebuilt our relationship. She knows that mummy doesn’t drink and she knows why – because it makes mummy ill, and she can’t stop.”
Although Lucy’s daughter lives with her father, Lucy sees her regularly – and they spent Christmas together. “That was wonderful,” enthuses Lucy. “She really made Christmas for me.”
At her worst, Lucy says, she was drinking 24/7. “There was no point at which I was sober between the ages of 20 and 26,” she continues. “I used to wake up at four in the morning and have half a pint of vodka.”
In the depths of depression, Lucy says the drink helped blot out her pain. “I was so depressed that turning over in bed was like asking me to do a PhD,” she admits. “I had panic attacks and terrible anxiety.”
And then came her moment of epiphany: crawling out of bed, the morning after witnessing a drunken brawl which left a close friend in hospital, Lucy knew she had two choices – die or give up the booze.
On her doctor’s advice, she started a 12-step programme straight away. Deciding to go cold turkey at home, alone, Lucy says the first few days were “horrendous”.
“I was sweating and shaking and I had terrifying hallucinations,” she recounts. “I’ve never done LSD but I would imagine that’s exactly what a bad trip is like.”
Along with following the 12 steps, Lucy says therapy has really helped her through. After a chance meeting with Cambridge therapist Angela Lattimore – in a pub, of all places – she started having both psychotherapy and hypnotherapy.
“Angie has been there for me the whole time,” says Lucy. “I’d tried therapy before but found it really frightening – all it did was make me drink more. But Angie was different: she treated me as a person, not as an alcoholic.”
Following on from working with Angela, 6 months ago Lucy met Damien Clements from dc:pt Integrated Health, an Exercise, Diet, and Lifestyle Coach.
“Since working with Damien, I feel energized, healthy, and happy with my body shape for the first time. He has shown me how my body works, what food, what exercise are right for me, and helped me change my lifestyle, so I feel in control, and I’ve lost 2 stone too!”
Angela and Damein are two of a group of complementary health practitioners at The Therapy Room in Cambridge.Based in the city’s Oxford Road, they offer everything from corrective exercise and life coaching to reiki and acupuncture. Lucy credits them with helping save her sanity – and her life.
“Having the DTs was horrific, and for the next three months it was a case of white-knuckling it,” she explains. “I just couldn’t do life; I’d spent the last six years living in a void.
“I was so scared. It was like I’d been kept in this small, dark box in my head – and then all of a sudden someone put the light on and stuck me in the middle of this big field.“I’m very sensitive, I think all alcoholics are. If people hurt me, I covered up that hurt by drinking. The world was a nasty, scary place and I didn’t want to play. So having to deal with all those feelings sober, with clarity, was pretty scary.”
Lucy hasn’t touched alcohol since that fateful day last November. “I started to get neuritis in my hands, like my dad, when I was only 24,” she says. “When I look at a bottle I remind myself of that. In fact, alcohol scares me; I only have to smell it and I back away.”
Lucy’s recovery is still going strong. And she’s determined to tell other people battling addictions there is light at the end of the tunnel. “I was the worst alcoholic there could be, and I’ve done it,” she says. “From my heart I believe my dad died so, in some way, I could get this message to other people: that you can be all right and you don’t have to die – you can choose to live, like I did.
“If someone’s out there in a situation like I was, holding a bottle of Blue Label and thinking: ‘Please God, help me,’ and I can show them there is hope, then that’s fantastic.”
“Even my best day drinking couldn’t compare with my worst, worst day sober: I really do love life,” adds Lucy, whose ambition is to become a TV presenter.
“And if there is an afterlife, I like to think my dad’s up there watching me – saying: ‘Yeah! Well done!’”