‘Raging alcoholic’ primary school teacher reveals she poured Jack Daniels on her CEREAL as she discusses addiction with a nurse who first tried Class-A drugs at 13
- Recovering addicts Melissa Rice and Jade Wye have a new BBC podcast
- Primary school teacher Melissa describes herself as a ‘raging alcoholic’
- Told how she used to pour Jack Daniels on her cereal before hitting ‘rock bottom’
- Jade tried her first class-A drug before spiraling into addiction
A former primary school teacher and self-described ‘raging alcoholic’ has told how she poured Jack Daniels on her cereal while in the throes of her addiction.
Melissa Rice, who has been in recovery since 2017, told how she went from being a ‘party girl’ to a ‘secret drinker’ dependent on booze in the first episode of Hooked: The Unexpected Addicts, a BBC 5 Live podcast for BBC Sounds.
Melissa co-hosts the podcast with Jade Wye, a mental health nurse and recovering drug addict who she met in rehab.
In the first episode, Melissa and Jade debunked the myth that addicts are either the super-rich or down-and-outs, pointing out that they both managed their addictions through university and then while working in trusted professions.
They also discussed how their dependency on drugs and alcohol developed to the point where they became addicts – and the moment they realised they were at ‘rock bottom’.
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Melissa Rice (right), who has been in recovery since 2017, told how she went from being a ‘party girl’ to a ‘secret drinker’ dependent on booze in the first episode of Hooked: The Unexpected Addicts, a BBC 5 Live podcast for BBC Sounds. Melissa co-hosts the podcast with Jade Wye (left), a mental health nurse and recovering drug addict who she met in rehab
‘I HAD JACK DANIELS WITH MY CEREAL’
Speaking on the episode, Melissa explained she had first tried alcohol as a teenager and started drinking more at university, where she used it as a way to cope with her anxiety.
Reaching rock bottom
Melissa said: ‘I reached that point of thinking, “I can’t do this anymore”. And the thing about reaching rock bottom is that you’ve got to reach that place yourself.
‘It was at that moment I could see what I’d done to my Mum. It was weird. I can remember her standing there, and it was the first time I’d realised just how much pain my Mum was in.’
Melissa had decided she was ready to quit drinking. However she needed to still be ‘weaned off’ alcohol as going cold turkey could put her life at risk.
She recalled: ‘That night, every couple of hours, I was allowed a shot of vodka.
‘I had to have something on the TV because you have bad insomnia, you feel like ants are all over you, you can’t sleep you’re shaking, you’re dry retching, you’re sweating profusely.
‘The final drink was at 7am. The most heart-wrenching thing about it was that my Mum had to pour it.
‘How selfless that is for my own Mum to have to give her own daughter a drink, not because she wanted to, but because if she didn’t, she could die. That was rock bottom.’
‘I didn’t know how to communicate what was going on inside,’ she said. ‘So as soon as drink came, and I could reinvent myself as this “party girl”… I loved it.’
However she later ‘crossed the border’ from ‘party girl’ to ‘drinking to cope’, she said.
‘I don’t know when that specific date was. There’s no passport that gets stamped when you cross that border. It’s progressive, it’s steady, and then when you’re in it, it’s like “oh s***”. I don’t know what to do.’
Melissa went on to realise a dream of a becoming a primary school teacher, hoping that maintaining a respected, stable job would ‘save’ her.
She added: ‘I thought, “If I become a primary school teacher, no one will think of me as the party girl any more”.’
As her dependency took hold, Melissa began drinking in secret and found herself hiding ‘a quarter bottle or a half bottle’ in the rooms of the home she shared with her mother.
Both Melissa and Jade recalled how they used to hide alcohol in Lucozade bottles, while Melissa confessed she used to fill water bottles with vodka.
She continued: ‘I realised pretty quick that the drink was a coping strategy. [When I drank] my over-thinking stopped. The paranoia that I was having, that would go away. Little did I realise that drink is a depressant in itself.’
Melissa had her last drink on the morning of 24 August 2017.
‘I WAS 13 WHEN I FIRST USED CLASS-A DRUGS’
Jade, pictured, spent time in and out of hospital and treatment programmes before making the commitment to herself to stop using drugs. Jade last used drugs on 19 January 2018
Jade first tried a Class-A drug aged 13 and said she first started using as a way to ‘escape’ feeling ‘really, really sad’ inside.
‘It was a given that I was going to end up taking drugs,’ Jade explained. ‘The person that I did my first drugs with genuinely believed that they were protecting me by doing it with them.’
Like Melissa, Jade managed her drug use throughout university, where she studied mental health nursing in a bid to understand herself and her mother.
Using for the last time
Jade continued: ‘I remember the moment I completely surrendered. I’d ended up in hospital again… and I just felt like I’d lost everything and I completely surrendered and I thought, “I need help” and I was ready to do it this time.
‘I knew that I was going to be up against a challenge because people had heard me say that so many times before.
‘But something within me had just changed and I knew that was the moment that I was really ready.
‘That said, they sent me to a psychiatric hospital and when I got there, I found drugs in my bra. They had literally just told me, “If you use here, we can’t keep you. You’re out”. And I found these drugs in my bra.
‘I thought, “I need help, I am ready to not take drugs anymore but how do I get rid of these drugs without taking them”. I genuinely did not know. And so I took them.
‘I haven’t used since.’
However her profession later became a shield that she used to deny her addiction from herself.
‘For a long time I was in denial and thought, “oh, I can’t be an addict because I have this job. I’m a nurse, I can’t possibly be an addict”. Then when I did realise, I felt like I couldn’t seek health because of that title.’
Jade spoke about how she slowly slipped into becoming increasingly dependent on drugs.
‘I forever told myself I wouldn’t do certain things, and then found myself doing those things,’ she continued. ‘A big one was, “I don’t use drugs on my own but other people do”. And then all of a sudden I found myself using on my own.
‘Then it was, “I wouldn’t do that for drugs”. And then I found myself doing that one thing I said I wouldn’t do. I did some things that, looking back now, really shock me and shame me. It’s hard to acknowledge some of these things.’
The addiction eventually spiraled and escalated, with Jade putting herself in increasingly dangerous situations with drugs.
Speaking about hitting rock bottom, Jade spoke of waking up in hospital after attempting suicide.
‘I ended up in a coma and when I came out of that coma my first thought was of drugs,’ she recalled. ‘That just shows where my addiction had taken me.
‘I ended up using drugs in the hospital and I didn’t question it.’
However her ‘real, real rock bottom’ came when she relapsed after leaving rehab.
‘The shame of that just absolutely floored me,’ she continued. ‘I just couldn’t accept what I had done.’
Jade spent time in and out of hospital and treatment programmes before making the commitment to herself to stop using drugs.
Jade last used drugs on 19 January 2018.
Hooked is a BBC 5 Live podcast for BBC Sounds
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