RACHAEL Keogh, author of the number one bestseller ‘Dying To Survive’, gave an inspirational talk in Limerick recently about her addiction to heroin and how it annihilated her formative years.
And if an image can speak a thousand words, the haunting picture of Rachael on the cover of her memoir screa
ms volumes. Looking like an extra from George A. Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’, the young zombified Dubliner was hooked on the Class A drug and barely clinging onto life when the startling photograph was taken back in 2006.
She was only 26 at the time and looks like a trapped, wounded animal backed into a corner and staring straight down the barrel of a gun. The raw anguish she exudes in that picture emotes the harsh realities of heroin addiction as this truly vulnerable and broken soul cries out for help behind tear-filled eyes.
A ravaged junkie, Rachael’s arms were rotten, the veins had collapsed and she was shooting directly into her capillaries — injecting more than 20 times a day to get a fix. She was faced with losing both her arms, an idea she was non-phased about at the time until a family intervention shook her from her insouciance. Overdosing several times a week in damp doorways and dark, lonesome stairwells, death shadowed Rachael biding its time to snatch her out of her heroin hell.
Rachael’s story is shocking, albeit marked with all the warning signs and pitfalls we have come to learn about addiction. Growing up on the Northside of Dublin, she started out as an ideal student involved in the local swim team, tennis club and choir.
Behind the ideal was a young girl who lacked self-confidence and easily succumbed to peer pressure. Her father was absent from her life since she was 5, and her mother, herself only a child when she gave birth to Rachel at 15, also flew the coop leaving a bright young daughter in the care of her grandparents.
Filled with feelings of abandonment and mindful of her grandfather’s fractious, drunken moodswings, she began practicing how to smoke in front of the mirror by 11 to be sure she looked ‘cool’ among her new friends living across the way in the Ballymun flats.
Experimentation with alcohol and hash were to be next. Then things quickly spiralled out of control. By the time Rachael was 13, she was smoking heroin and at 15 she was injecting it directly into her veins. She had begun a doomed affair with hard drugs that would last over a decade, dragging her through the gutters all the way to death’s door.
For Rachael the plaintive lyrics of U2’s ‘Running To Stand Still’ were to ring all too true. “I see seven towers, but I only see one way out.”
However, unlike many of her close friends growing up, Rachael did find a way out. Thankfully, her inspiring story has a happy ending and she’s still here to tell it. And that’s just what she did when she took up Novas Community Detox Service’s invitation to speak in Limerick about her heroin addiction and recovery.
Following the screening of a Sky news documentary about her story, the inspirational author spoke openly to recovering and former addicts and their families about her own nightmarish experience with drugs.
Blessed with model looks, 33-year-old Rachael is an optimistic and articulate young woman with a remarkable story of redemption to tell.
In the last eight heroin free years of her life, she has found love; is the proud mother of a six-year-old son and is also studying psychotherapy. Taking to the stage at 69 O’Connell Street for a question and answers session, she eludes all the strength, determination and grit it took for her to clean up her act, but the ghost of the wounded, insecure teenage junkie still lingers.
“By the time I was 26, I had lost all hope. I was Queen of all relapses. I had lost all hope of ever getting off heroin and believed I was going to be on drugs for life.
“My family did their best but, for their own sanity and wellbeing, they had to throw me out. This only reinforced my belief that the world was against me and that nobody loved me. I was like a child and this only fuelled my addiction. I felt like the world owed me something.
“When I was 23, I went hell for leather on the drugs and everything went out the window. I was overdosing on a regular basis and in and out of hospitals. When I was told both my arms might have to be amputated, I didn’t really take it in at first and stopping taking heroin wasn’t an option. Taking heroin for me was a form of passive suicide,” she reveals.
Rachael’s mother was living in Lanzarote at this time and was told that her daughter didn’t have long to live. The subsequent family intervention was the first move to save Rachael’s life with her mother taking the bold step of sending a photograph of her junkie daughter to national newspapers to highlight her story. Rachael then became front-page news and eventually started on her long and courageous path towards recovery.
“I was exposed to the world as a junkie. I felt so small, so disempowered and knew that I would never be valued while I was on drugs. I realised that I was conditioned to think that a bag of gear was always going to be the solution to my problems. I was only a child when I started taking drugs. I was shy, introverted and I didn’t know any better. It all happened really quickly and I just slipped under the radar.
“I went full force into that lifestyle. Drugs were my preoccupation from the moment I woke up in the morning. I would steal from shops just to get the money and spent time in prison and played out this tough woman character. Heroin stripped me of everything. The drugs weren’t the problem, the problems were there before the drugs, and to me they were the solution. I know so many people that died from heroin. They didn’t choose that. At the end it was that fear of dying that gave me courage. Life itself became more important than life with drugs,” said Rachael.
The empowered young mother of one told Limerick addicts that the “pay-off for being clean is far bigger than the pay-off from drugs”. One of the lucky ones, managing to turn her life around and get a second chance, she also highlighted the fact that drug abuse is the cause of one death per day in Ireland.
“I had lots of rock bottoms and knew I was going to die if I didn’t stop. Life can get better without drugs and that knowledge is what gave me strength,” she vowed.
