Holly Dyson’s last drink was a can of cider, which she had in her dad’s car on the way to rehab on May 2, 2023. She drank it to manage her withdrawal symptoms. She had barely eaten in two weeks. In her final days at home in northwest England, she spent her time vomiting blood into the toilet and lying in bed, twitching and feeling unbearably sick. Her hand hovered over the numbers 999 on her phone, ready to call an ambulance. At 26, her body was shutting down.
About a week earlier, a doctor had told her she had six months to live. Over the past few years, her drinking had spiraled out of control. Her liver was “deranged,” the doctor said. To Dyson, it felt like “a bowling ball” – so heavy and swollen that she had to use “two hands to lift my body up out of bed.” Her face was also swollen, and she no longer looked like the sporty young woman she used to be.
But Dyson says she was “past the point of caring.” She adds, “I just couldn’t do this anymore.”
Dyson grew up in Tarleton, a rural village between Preston and Southport in England, and her childhood was happy. “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 changed when she turned 12 and her mom 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, like divorce, which disrupts emotional development and can cause chronic stress. Now in therapy, Dyson believes her parents’ separation led to “an intense fear” of abandonment.
Dyson had her first alcoholic drink at 16 – a fruity cider in the park with friends – but she didn’t get drunk until she went to university in Leeds in 2015. “Everywhere I looked there were people doing cocaine, pills, and MDMA.” But drugs never appealed to Dyson as much as alcohol did.
As a student, she quickly made friends in her dorm and fell for a “tall, dark, handsome southerner,” who became her on-and-off lover. He went with her to her mom’s wedding to a new partner in 2016 and became her best friend. But he could also be abusive, especially on nights out, when he would call her 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 handle the betrayal and pain, and she dropped out of university.
It was on a sunny day in 2017 that she poured herself the drink that would change everything: a gin and tonic, which she drank before heading to her job as a personal trainer. That one drink “lit up my brain,” she says.
Dyson had moved in with her mom, and it wasn’t long before her stash of gin was gone. She refilled the bottles with water so her mom wouldn’t know she 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.
“No physical pain will ever compare to the emotional pain I went through,” she says.Here’s the rewritten version in fluent, natural English:
Her best friend Alice was especially worried. On Dyson’s birthday, at Dyson’s own house, Alice bought her non-alcoholic prosecco to celebrate. “I was deeply offended,” says Dyson. She left the party as quickly as she could because she didn’t see the point of a social event without alcohol. By that point, she was drinking several bottles of wine every night.
In 2020, Dyson started getting terrible liver pain and went to Southport Hospital’s A&E, where she met the hospital’s alcohol liaison team for the first time. A scan showed she had severe liver disease, but “it meant nothing to me. I hadn’t hit rock bottom yet,” she says. “I wasn’t ready 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 withdrawal symptoms like shaking, vomiting, irritability, and loss of appetite. She would pour wine into a Lucozade bottle, top it up with Lipton’s peach iced tea, and drink it throughout the day while working as an administrator. When she finished work at 2pm, she’d buy more wine on the way home.
By 8pm, she says, she would be very drunk, but she’d open a few more bottles of cider and line them up by the bed so she wouldn’t wake her partner when she opened them. She drank them “like water” through the night. “I had to do everything I could to drink alcohol 24/7.”
It was an expensive habit. As soon as she got paid, Dyson would spend £300–400 on alcohol, thinking it would last the month. But it barely lasted the week. When she ran out of money, she’d ask her mum, then her dad, for petrol money and use it to buy more alcohol. When that still wasn’t enough, she took out loan after loan.
“When five grand drops into your bank account, you go absolutely wild and buy the most expensive gins and all the flavours,” she says. “It was bad for my future because when I came out of addiction, I had £10,000 worth of debt. I couldn’t keep up with the repayments, so now I have a debt management plan. That means for the next six years, I can’t get a mortgage or a credit card because my credit score is ridiculously low.”
During her stays in hospital, Dyson was given Librium (the brand name for chlordiazepoxide) to help manage her acute alcohol withdrawal symptoms. For alcoholics, withdrawal can be deadly, causing confusion, seizures, and hallucinations. But when she got home, she would self-medicate with cans of cider. She couldn’t walk properly or keep food down. However, “once I got through that” with a mix of patience and more alcohol, she would think, “I’m fixed now, I can drink again.”
Dyson’s maternal grandmother died from alcoholism at age 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 how serious it was until she visited the doctor, who told her father how long he thought she had left to live. He quickly moved Dyson back into his house, and “there were two or three nights where I was so ill, withdrawing and being sick” that he stayed awake with her all night. He got rid of all the alcohol in the house and took away her bank cards. Before this, Dyson had only seen her dad cry once—the day he told her that her mum had left them. “But in 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 drank it all in her room. Neither of them has any idea how she paid for it. That day, he drove her to a private rehab facility called Ocean.After recovering in Blackpool, she took out a loan to pay for her care. “If he hadn’t gotten me into rehab when he did, I wouldn’t be here,” Dyson says.
According to Alcohol Change, about 15% of women in England drink in ways that harm their health. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of women dying specifically from alcohol-related causes rose by 39%. Yet women are much less likely to seek traditional treatment programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. Research shows that women and men often drink for different reasons: women drink to numb, hide, or ease feelings of shame linked to their own experiences of being victimized, while men more often drink to relax and separate rest time from work. The stigma around addiction can also deepen women’s shame, making them more likely to deny their dependence on alcohol and keep it hidden.
Dyson is the first to admit she had a fixed 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 doesn’t discriminate.” On the first morning of her rehab, “I poked my head around the door at breakfast and I remember thinking, ‘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 lots of people looking out for me.” She went on many walks, did group therapy, meditation, and yoga. She would paint in the evenings and spent a lot of time talking with her peers.
But she says the real hard work began when she was discharged and had to return to life without constant monitoring and support. In rehab, Dyson was surrounded by people who had shared the same experiences, and she could talk with them 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 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, like running a marathon, will ever compare to the emotional pain I went through during addiction.”
Now, Dyson notices alcohol everywhere and disapproves of the heavy drinking culture that’s common in the UK. She doesn’t like how 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 at the entrance—that’s going to be harmful to someone’s health.”
As part of her role at Change Grow Live, she’s eager to share the “raw, unfiltered truth of addiction” in the hope that someone going through 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 out of bed, it’s lying to get money. It’s awful,” she says. “Admitting you’re struggling is the bravest and most important thing you can do to save yourself.”
Recently, Dyson had a liver scan that showed she now has no scarring or fatty liver. “It’s more or less completely rejuvenated and healed itself.” Her blood tests 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 have to work on it every day—once you get 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 offers links to various support services. In the US, you can call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is available at 1800 250 015. Families and friends can get help from Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the statement I had my first drink at 16 By the time I was 26 I was told I had six months to live
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 Is it really possible to go from having your first drink at 16 to being told you have six months to live at 26
Yes its possible This timeline often points to a very rapid severe progression of alcoholrelated liver disease such as alcoholic hepatitis or cirrhosis especially with heavy daily drinking
2 What does six months to live mean in this context
It typically means the doctor believes the liver damage is so severe that its no longer functioning properly and without a transplant or significant recovery the patients body is likely to fail within that timeframe
3 Does this mean everyone who drinks at 16 will have this problem
No This is an extreme case Most people who start drinking at 16 do not develop fatal liver disease by 26 It usually requires a combination of heavy sustained drinking genetics and other health factors
4 What kind of drinking causes this
This usually comes from chronic heavy drinkingoften defined as 8 drinks per day for men or 6 for women over many years Binge drinking alone rarely causes this so quickly
5 Is the six months deadline always accurate
No Its a serious medical estimate based on the current condition Some people live longer with aggressive treatment while others may decline faster
AdvancedLevel Questions
6 What specific liver disease would cause this rapid decline
The most likely culprits are acute alcoholic hepatitis or decompensated cirrhosis Both can be fatal within months without intervention
7 Can a person recover from a six months to live diagnosis
Yes but its difficult If the patient stops drinking immediately some people with alcoholic hepatitis can recover For cirrhosis a liver transplant is often the only option for longterm survival
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