{"response":{"status":"ok","userTier":"developer","total":1,"content":{"id":"lifeandstyle/2026/jul/28/first-alcoholic-drink-16-by-26-six-months-to-live","type":"article","sectionId":"lifeandstyle","sectionName":"Life and style","webPublicationDate":"2026-07-28T09:00:34Z","webTitle":"I had my first alcoholic drink at 16. By 26, I was given six months to live","webUrl":"https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/28/first-alcoholic-drink-16-by-26-six-months-to-live","apiUrl":"https://content.guardianapis.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/28/first-alcoholic-drink-16-by-26-six-months-to-live","fields":{"headline":"I had my first alcoholic drink at 16. By 26, I was given six months to live","firstPublicationDate":"2026-07-28T09:00:34Z","lastModified":"2026-07-28T09:00:35Z","bodyText":"Holly Dyson’s last alcoholic drink was a can of cider to manage her withdrawal symptoms, which she had in her dad’s car on the way to rehab on 2 May 2023. She’d barely eaten in two weeks. Instead, she spent her last few days at home in the north-west of England vomiting blood into the toilet bowl and lying in bed twitching, feeling unbearably nauseous. Her hand hovered over the numbers 999 on her phone, ready to call an ambulance. At 26 years old, Dyson’s body was shutting down. About a week earlier, a doctor had given her six months to live. For the past few years, her drinking had spiralled out of control. Her liver was “deranged”, the doctor said. To Dyson, it felt like “a bowling ball” – weighing her down so much that she would have to use “two hands to lift my body up out of bed because my liver felt so heavy and swollen.” Her face was also swollen and she was unrecognisable from the sporty young woman she had once been. But Dyson was “past the point of caring,” she says. “I just couldn’t do this any more.” Dyson’s childhood in Tarleton, a rural village between Preston and Southport, in England, was blissful. “I lived in this little bubble where nothing bad ever happened and everything was so lovely.” She was the only child of happily married parents: “This perfect little blond, happy, everyone-loved-us-family,” she says. That all changed when she turned 12 and her mum moved out. “I absolutely did not see it coming,” she says of her parents’ divorce. Some research has found that alcohol dependency can be linked to early childhood trauma, such as divorce, which disrupts emotional development and can cause chronic stress. Now in therapy, Dyson attributes her parents’ separation to her developing “an intense fear” of abandonment. Dyson had her first alcoholic drink at 16 years old – a fruity cider in the park with her friends – but she didn’t get drunk until she went to university in Leeds in 2015. “Everywhere I looked there were people doing cocaine, there were people doing pills, there were people doing MDMA.” But drugs never held the same appeal for Dyson as drink. As a student, she quickly made friends at her halls of residence and fell for a “tall, dark, handsome southerner”, who became her on and off lover. He accompanied Dyson to her mum’s wedding to a new partner in 2016 and became her best friend. But he could also be abusive, particularly on a night out, when he would call her derogatory names and grab her wrists aggressively, she says. When Dyson found out he had been cheating on her with two of her closest friends, she couldn’t cope with the deceit and pain, and she dropped out of university. It was on a sunny day in 2017 that she poured herself the drink that would derail her: a gin and tonic, which she drank before heading to her job as a personal trainer. That one “lit up my brain”, she says. Dyson had moved in with her mum and it wasn’t long before her stash of gin was gone. She refilled the bottles with water so her mum wouldn’t know that Dyson had drunk them alone, then started hiding the evidence in her bedroom and car. It became a full-time obsession. “Your every thought is: ‘Where’s my next drink coming from? Can we afford the next drink? What are we going to get to drink? Where are we going to hide it?’ That’s just on repeat.” For the first couple of years, she was good at hiding her dependency. Dyson began living with her boyfriend of a few years, who was very laid-back and never confronted her about her drinking, but friends started to notice. “I looked dreadful,” she says. “You couldn’t look at me and not know something was wrong.” She doesn’t ever remember blacking out but she would sometimes wake up covered in mysterious bruises. Her best friend Alice was particularly concerned; on Dyson’s birthday at her house, she bought her non-alcoholic prosecco to celebrate with. “I was deeply offended,” says Dyson, who left the celebrations as quickly as she could because she didn’t see the point in a social event without alcohol. At this point she was drinking several bottles of wine a night. In 2020, Dyson started getting horrendous liver pains and took herself to Southport hospital’s A&E, where she met the hospital alcohol liaison team for the first time. A scan found that she had severe liver disease, but “it meant nothing to me. I wasn’t at the point where I’d hit rock bottom yet,” she says. “I wasn’t at the point where I wanted to stop drinking.” Over the next few years, Dyson was in and out of hospital. She switched from gin to cider, which she sipped first thing in the morning to stop the withdrawal symptoms: shaking, vomiting, irritability and a loss of appetite. She would pour wine into a Lucozade bottle, top it up with Lipton’s peach ice tea, and drink it throughout the day while working as an administrator. When she finished at 2pm, Dyson would buy more wine on her way home. By 8pm, she would be very drunk, she says, but would crack open a few more bottles of cider and line them up by the bed, so as not to wake up her partner when she opened them, drinking them “like water” throughout the night. “I had to do everything I could to be able to drink alcohol 24/7.” It was an expensive habit. As soon as she was paid, Dyson would spend £300-400 on alcohol, thinking it would last her for the month. But it would barely last the week. When she ran out of money, she would ask her mum, then her dad, for petrol money, and use it to buy more booze. And when that still didn’t cover her costs, she took out loan after loan. “When five grand drops in your bank account, you go absolutely wild and get the most expensive gins and all the flavours,” she says, “It was detrimental to my future because when I came out of addiction I had 10 grand’s worth of debt, I couldn’t keep up with the repayments, so now I’ve got a debt management plan, which means, for the next six years, I can’t get a mortgage, and I can’t get a credit card because my credit score is ridiculously low.” During her stints in hospital, Dyson was given Librium, the brand name for chlordiazepoxide, to help her manage her acute alcohol withdrawal symptoms. For alcoholics, withdrawal can be deadly, causing confusion, seizures and hallucinations. However, when she returned home, she would self-medicate with cans of cider. She wouldn’t be able to walk properly or keep food down. But “once I got through that” with a mixture of patience and more alcohol, she would think: “I’m fixed now, I can drink again.” Dyson’s maternal grandmother had died from alcoholism when she was 52, three months after Dyson was born. “My mum thought all the worrying about me might give her a heart attack,” says Dyson. But her dad didn’t understand the severity of the issue until she visited the doctor – and he told her father how long he believed she had left to live. He swiftly moved Dyson back into his house and “there were two or three nights where I was so ill, withdrawing, being sick” that he stayed awake with her through the night. He got rid of any alcohol in the house, took away her bank cards. Previously, Dyson had only seen her dad cry once – the day he told her that her mum had left them. “But those final few days before I went to rehab, I saw him cry quite a lot.” Her dad knew there was nothing more he could do for her when she came home with alcohol and downed the lot in her room. Neither of them have any idea how she paid for it. That day, he drove her to a private rehab facility called Ocean Recovery in Blackpool and took out a loan to pay for her care. “If he hadn’t got me into rehab when he did, I wouldn’t be here,” says Dyson. *** It is estimated that 15% of women in England drink in a way that damages their health, according to Alcohol Change. From 2019 to 2023, there was a 39% increase in female alcohol-specific mortality rates. Yet women are significantly less likely to seek out traditional treatment programmes, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Research has found that women and men often drink for different reasons: women to numb, hide or alleviate feelings of shame related to their own victimisation, whereas men more often drink to relax and to distinguish rest time from work. Stigma around addiction can also reinforce women’s sense of shame, meaning they are more inclined to be in denial about their dependence on alcohol, and keep it hidden. Dyson is the first to admit that she had a set idea of what an alcoholic looks like, and it wasn’t her. “I had everything going for me: I was a young girl, I was fit, I was active, I had a wonderful family, I had a home, I was safe, I was loved, but that didn’t stop it,” she says. “It does not stigmatise.” On the first morning of her rehabilitation, “I put my head round the door at breakfast and I remember going: ‘Shit, everyone is normal.’” Dyson stayed at the facility for 28 days. “I was the youngest by a good 20 years,” she says. “I was the baby. I had loads of people looking out for me.” She went on a lot of walks, did group therapy, meditation and yoga. She would paint in the evening, and spent a long time chatting with her peers. But, she said, the hard work really started when she was discharged, and had to return to life without consistent monitoring and support. In rehab, Dyson was surrounded by people who had shared the same experience as her, who she could talk with at length about her struggles. Dyson says her new job as a support worker for the drug and alcohol service Change Grow Live has also helped her to stay sober – talking openly about the pain of addiction is a daily reminder of the difficulties she went through. She still enjoys painting and exercises regularly; she ran a London Landmarks half marathon in April and is training for a full marathon next. “No physical pain, such as running a marathon, will ever compare to the emotional pain that I went through during addiction.” Now, Dyson notices alcohol everywhere and disapproves of the culture of heavy drinking which is prevalent in the UK. She doesn’t like the way alcohol is marketed in supermarkets, where there are “‘buy two crates for a tenner’ signs everywhere.” She thinks alcohol should be hidden like cigarettes and sweets. “People forget that alcohol is a drug and that there are millions of people with alcohol problems. If you have a really rough day, you walk into a supermarket and before you’ve even picked up your basket you’re seeing all these offers on alcohol in the doorway – that’s going to be detrimental to someone’s health” As part of her role at Change Grow Live, she is keen to share the “raw, unfiltered truth of addiction” in the hope that someone experiencing what she did can find the strength to reach out for help. “Let’s show what alcohol addiction is really like: it’s vomiting blood, it’s not being able to get off the bed, it’s lying to get money. It’s awful,” she says. “Admitting you’re struggling is the bravest and most important thing that you can do to save yourself.” Recently, Dyson had a scan of her liver, which showed she now has no scarring or fatty liver. “It’s more or less completely rejuvenated and has fixed itself.” Her blood results also show that her liver function is in the normal range. “That does make me emotional,” she says. “People say recovery is hard and I get it because you’ve got to work on it every day – once you’re complacent relapses happen,” says Dyson. “But I will say addiction is harder than recovery, 100%. Addiction is a full-time 24/7 job.” • In the UK, Taking Action on Addiction provides links to different support services. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186"},"isHosted":false,"pillarId":"pillar/lifestyle","pillarName":"Lifestyle"}}}