I was born into immense privilege, but I became so addicted to heroin I smoked it while pregnant. It took over my life and marriage - until my best friend Davina McCall saved my life with this four-word intervention

Sitting in my VW Golf, overwhelmed by thoughts of happier times with my two young sons, I reached into my glove compartment.Surreptitiously, I took out a small packet of brown powder, sprinkled a little on the foil it was wrapped in and lit the powder from below.Inhaling deeply, I felt my anxiety give way to a surge of calm. As the heroin hijacked my brain, I slipped into delicious nothingness.Then a sharp rap on the window shook me out of my reverie. 'Excuse me, madam, can you please open the door and exit the vehicle.' It was late at night and, at the sight of the policeman, I panicked and dropped the paraphernalia at my feet while opening the door. I looked in horror as foil and flakes of brown powder fell onto the policeman's black boots. 'Can you explain what this is?' he asked. 'It's for my asthma,' I stammered.His eyes searched the darkness of the car's interior and made out the child's car seat in the back, judgment and disgust so obvious in his face. Shame flooded through me. I held my head and wept. 'I don't know how to stop,' I begged desperately.'It makes you do the most terrible things. It's like I've been possessed by something more frightening than anything else when I'm using. It's the constant wanting to be anything but me.'I had said more words in this short space of time than I had in weeks. He paused, then scribbled a number on a piece of paper.'Call this helpline,' he said quietly. 'If you're serious about stopping, this is a start.' Sarah Hiscox says that in her twenties, she 'never felt good enough and was crippled with low self-esteem'As he let me off without even a warning, I swore I would. I truly believed I would.But even at this moment of humiliation, I hadn't finished with heroin yet.The year was 1998. I was 31 and I still had two years of using left before I would finally hit my rock bottom – an overdose in a grotty Earl's Court drug den. How did this happen to me? Me, whose mother was so socially aware she would have burst into flames if I used the word serviette instead of napkin and who banned Enid Blyton books from the house because she didn't want us reading those 'frightful common rags'.My father Anthony was a Harley Street doctor with a lucrative side hustle as a property developer and would regularly tell me: 'I hope you're proud of the fact I own the biggest private medical practice in London.'Home was a stone farmhouse in Suffolk dating to the Reformation.Dad worked in London during the week, visiting at weekends. Privately educated – it was a battle to keep the private school out of my voice when later I was begging junkies for a score under railway arches – my fellow pupils were daughters of shipping tycoons and bankers.I left school in the late 80s and landed in the buzzy Notting Hill scene – all bohemian chic, with parties in stucco-fronted townhouses.My best friend was, and remains, TV presenter Davina McCall, who I met through mutual friends (ironically, when she was at the height of her own drug addiction when we were 19, I was the 'steady Eddie' who never touched drugs and helped her get clean). Sarah with her book, The Beginning And End Of Everything, and her best friend, television presenter Davina McCall Around this time I also met my husband Renshaw, an architect, whose mother was an American heiress. Her ancestors had made their fortune from inventing the traffic light and signal system for US railways and she lived in fully-staffed splendour on New York's Park Avenue.We married, blissfully in love, in 1994, when we were both 27. I adored Renshaw, more than any other man I had met and was pregnant almost immediately after our wedding.Life appeared complete – more than that, picture perfect. But always at my heart was a hole, a devastating gap nothing seemed to fill. I never felt good enough and was crippled with low self-esteem.My mother Susie had been cold and unloving, drilling a deeply damaging fear of becoming fat into my younger sister, Belinda, and me.Mum existed on a daily diet of half a boiled egg and two bottles of wine. In my late teens, after a terrible car crash I was lucky to survive, I came round to find her at my hospital bed declaring: 'Think of all that weight you've lost, you lucky duck.'She became a hopeless alcoholic, miserable at my father's philandering with female patients or her own friends.Aged eight, I began to suffer from nightmares, gripped by terror that Dad was going to die and I'd be left with Mum. I'd creep into her bed, but after a few weeks her patience snapped and she took me to the doctor. 'Now, young lady, what's all this about you keeping your mother awake? She needs all her energy to look after you and your sister.''I'm sorry, I keep having nightmares.' Davina, who has previously struggled with addiction, confronted Sarah about her drug use'Well, I'm going to give you something to help you sleep. Take one every night for a couple of weeks and we'll have no more of this nonsense.' At bedtime, Mum handed me a little pill from a brown glass bottle that read Mogadon, a powerful sedative.I slept through in a dreamless warmth; the first delicious taste of the oblivion I would later seek out. It felt like coming home. After those pills ran out, I taught myself to stay in bed as best I could. But by 13, I was secretly helping myself to my mum's temazepam – a sedative I suspect she took for anxiety.Later, I found Palfium in my father's jacket pocket, prescribed for back pain. A powerful opioid analgesic, Palfium is a manufactured form of heroin, three times more potent than morphine but much shorter-acting. I would feel an intense high for half an hour, before slowly drifting down to earth, comforted by the afterglow.I was already a heroin addict at this tender age, years before I had even heard of the drug.Eventually, this supply too ran out, to be replaced by another addiction: bingeing on food and purging violently. By my early 20s, I hated myself when I looked in the mirror. I wanted to rub myself out, cut off my stomach, scratch out my eyeballs.My bulimia would remain with me for years after – through the early days of my relationship with Renshaw, on my wedding day, and even through my first pregnancy with my son Linus. Thankfully, Linus was born healthy, an instant balm to my spirits. Suddenly I felt a different type of intoxication, a different type of love.However, my bulimia continued. After 18 months at home looking after my son, I thought a part-time job would help my state of mind.All I was doing at home was baking cakes 'for Linus' then gorging on them. Davina had encouraged Sarah's husband, Renshaw, to send Sarah to rehab after finding she had drugs in the houseI took a job as a part-time assistant to a friend of a friend who worked as a casting director on modelling shoots.At lunchtime on my first day, my new boss Cressida took me into an empty office and produced a small box from her bag.'Sarah, would you like some of this? It's very naughty but quite yummy.' It was a cellophane-packed brown nub of something. 'We'll only do a teeny-weeny bit,' she assured me. 'We're the same, like naughty little sisters. It'll be our secret.'I was no ingenue. I knew what it was – heroin – and panicked. I wanted to say no but she was so nice I didn't want to let her down.Smoking felt like a homecoming; extraordinary contentment washed through me. How had I lived without this feeling?Quickly my days at work became more important than my family. Twice a day, the drug stopped me making myself sick and the shame I felt about my bulimia went away.Ironically, heroin took away the self-loathing and made me feel normal, capable of being a mother and a wife.At one point during that first year, Renshaw confronted me about my erratic behaviour, suspecting I was on drugs. I denied I had a problem. Sarah says that through the years, Davina's support was often the one thing that kept her goingBy the time Linus was three, I had been taking heroin for a year and a half. I was able to pick him up from nursery, make dinner, put him to bed with a story and then get stoned before Renshaw came home. I was no longer interested in sex but my husband put it down to fatigue. Or maybe he suspected but felt the consequences were too big for him to think about.I managed to hide my addiction from my friends and family. Mum was now divorced from Dad and living in Norfolk, drunk and isolated from us all. My sister Belinda was married and expecting her first baby and wouldn't have suspected anything. I sensed that Davina had her suspicions but she too was so busy that avoiding her was easy.Despite how my life was unravelling, I decided it was a good time to have another baby. I convinced myself that once I was pregnant my using would halt. But it didn't.I became pregnant with Bache in 1999, when Linus was four. The pull of addiction continued, incinerating every doubt, every concern, every moment of guilt and shame.Yet, my feelings swung from terror I was harming the baby to the terrible craving for more drugs.When Bache was born, I couldn't look at him. Whenever he cried, I cried. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I said, over and over to him.Throughout the pregnancy, I had battled with myself to try to stick to a 'three days on, three days off' routine and I hadn't used for two excruciating weeks before I was due. When he was born, he wasn't addicted. Once home, I lay in bed all day, depressed. A doctor prescribed Prozac, saying I had postnatal depression. If only. Before too long, I was back on heroin.It all came to a head six months after giving birth when Davina came to visit and confronted me.'You're using, Sarah. I know you are,' she said.I shot a glance at Renshaw, who was holding the baby. 'I'm not. Will you stop?' I said, heat flooding my face.'You're lying,' she persisted. 'You're lying to him and to me.''Davina, please,' Renshaw said. 'Now's not the time.''Wake up, Rench, for f**** sake!' she snapped. 'She's lying to you, to everyone. I bet she's got drugs upstairs.'Davina made for the stairs. I chased after her but she went straight to my chest of drawers, rummaging until she found the wrap, holding it up like a macabre trophy. Renshaw had followed us, still holding Bache.'You see?' she said, thrusting the wrap at him. 'You've got to get her into rehab – you can't trust a word she says.' Renshaw looked beaten. 'Sarah? Should we send you away?' As I cried, Davina put her arms around me. Rench sat on the side of the bed, shellshocked. He took my hand: 'It's OK. We'll get you some help. We'll be fine.'We weren't. A short stay at the Priory was disastrously ineffective, as was a later trip to a rehab facility in Arizona. A family holiday to a Gloucestershire cottage ended in Renshaw discovering I had got my dealer to send me drugs in the post. He kicked me out and asked for a divorce, in words I will never forget.'Do you know, it's like heroin is your lover. It's as if you've been having an affair for the past couple of years.'I was sure you would see what you were losing and you would come back to us. But I realise now that you've gone and I must take care of the boys and me.'At first I stayed with my sister, who soon asked me to leave when she woke one morning to find me in a stupor at her kitchen table, surrounded by drugs paraphernalia – and eventually ended up in my mother's spare room, before Renshaw rented me a flat as part of our divorce settlement. He insisted he would only let me see the children under supervision and with a clean urine test to prove I wasn't high.When I did see the boys, by now aged one and four, once or twice a week, they were clearly ill at ease with me.All I had left was heroin – even Belinda and Davina had cut me off, no doubt believing it would help me come to my senses. By then I was only taking it to stem my feelings of self-hatred, guilt and shame. There was no euphoria.It took three years to reach rock bottom in that Earl's Court bedsit. I was five and a half stone and my hair was falling out.Yet still I asked the toothless drug dealer politely: 'Shirley, have you got any foil please?''No, love, you're going to have to shoot it up. Smoking is a waste anyway. You're a dirty junkie, same as me. I'll do it for you.'The rush was immediate, too strong. I woke up in A&E, having been found on a doorstep. The doctors asked if I wanted to call anyone – to which I replied no, there was no one. I was discharged onto the street clutching a leaflet about addiction.It was then that a friend – another user – called me. He had got clean thanks to a detox facility run in a Palladian mansion in the Midlands countryside. The treatment was based on NLP, neurolinguistic programming. It basically rewires your thought patterns, replacing negative thoughts you have about yourself with positive ones. Roddy, head of the facility, believed he could help addicts replace triggers with positive affirmations.My options were pretty slim, so it certainly wasn't going to do any harm.When I arrived, I had been clean for two weeks. Roddy explained how we could replace the negative thoughts we had about ourselves.I would tell him about a time I had been truly happy and bring that picture to life. I picked breakfast in bed with my boys and Roddy told me to notice the smells, sounds, what I was wearing, what the children were wearing, what their hair felt like when I touched it and the sensation of their little wriggling bodies against mine.Something shifted and I started to suspect all the damaging thoughts I had been repeating to myself over the years were not true. What if I really was good enough? What if change, fundamental change, was possible?For the first time in a long time, the idea of living a life without drugs was reachable and I believed I deserved it.I went back to London a month later and after a further two months of being clean, I was seeing Renshaw and the boys almost every night. Always in the back of my mind was the hope we would be a family once more.After nine months, I was living in a flat around the corner from the children, now aged eight and four. They stayed overnight and I loved being a mother again. The boys accepted me back as if I'd never been away. I was amazed by them.They weren't the only amazing ones. Renshaw asked me if we could try again – and we remarried in 2010, with our then five-year-old daughter Lucy front and centre of celebrations.Davina was there too, of course – through the years her support was often the one thing that kept me going.Twenty-five years on, I am still clean. And beside me, still, is Renshaw, the love of my life. More handsome than ever when I walked down the aisle to him for the second time, there was just one difference in his appearance: a single streak of grey in his hair. His Sarah streak, as he's dubbed it.Against all the odds, we made it through – together.The Beginning And End Of Everything by Sarah Hiscox (£12.99, September). © Sarah Hiscox 2026. To order a copy for £11.69 (offer valid to 17/09/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.Adapted by Maureen Brookbanks