A woman who considered herself a non-drinker started to drink vodka and three-years later was told she had 24 hours to live as her organs were failing. Charlotte Durcan, 30, says she went from nothing, to drinking three litres of vodka a day.
She was drinking so much she started to have seizures and blackouts, then doctors explained how ill she really was. Charlotte told LancsLive: "I drank to the extreme and that's my personality, I don't do things by halves. It's always everything is the furthest I can take it, in a sense.
"I was drinking really heavily and basically, it grabbed me."
Charlotte says she found that every time she didn't have a drink she would start shaking and sweating. The mum-of-two added: "In the mornings, I would have to have a drink, just to level me out.
"It would be vodka and that would be a pint of vodka neat. That would be literally to stop me from shaking and stop me from being too sick and sweating - that'd work.
"From there, it would just carry on throughout the day, but obviously, when money went tight and things, I would try and get family to get me drink. I was using all my money up on drink, so they'd sometimes only be able to get me bottles of wine and things.
"Then I started to realise it was a problem, when I could have a full bottle of wine and it wouldn't affect me."
After blacking out again, she visited hospital for the first time. She was kept in, but despite going four days without drinking she went straight back to the drink when she was discharged and ended up back in hospital again.
She fell into the same pattern at least three more times.
"The last time, I ended up in intensive care with multiple organ failure," Charlotte said. "I had heart failure, liver failure, kidney failure and they had to take two litres of fluid from my lungs and I was in for three weeks, but I couldn't move, I couldn't speak, I couldn't talk.
"So I was in intensive care, I was on oxygen and they got all of my family in to say bye to me. I was literally on end-of-life care."
Charlotte's family visited her at 2am after they were told she had only 24 hours left to live. However, she says that somehow she "managed to pull through" and ended up going to rehab after recovering from her hospital visit.
Now, the mum is celebrating 11 months of sobriety and is volunteering for Inspire Lancashire - helping people with addictions who may not appear to be suffering on the outside.
Charlotte said: "I think people think that you have to be an alcoholic for so many years or start off as a drinker, then a binge drinker and then you're an alcoholic. Whereas, I'm trying to raise awareness that it can literally happen to you so quickly, without you even realising and then it can be too late for some people.
"I was close to dying, all of my family thought I was going to die, but I didn't have a clue because I was so out of it. That was my outcome after two years of drinking heavily."
