Coming Clean Diary of a Painkiller Addict From Wreckage to Redemption - My True Story

Coming Clean : Diary of a Painkiller Addict : From Wreckage to Redemption - My True Story
ISBN: 9780749958077
Publication Date: 28 March 2017

A heart-rending memoir that lifts the lid on the issue painkiller addiction, showing the price one woman paid and her fight to recover

What if the drugs that were meant to cure you slowly started to kill you

After falling dangerously ill with acute-on-chronic pancreatitis, Cathryn Kemp left hospital with a repeat prescription for fentanyl, a painkiller 100 times stronger than heroin.

Within two years she was taking almost ten times the NHS maximum daily dose - all on prescription - and her life began to spiral out of control. Cathryn discovered she had just three months to live, unless she gave up the drug she clung to so desperately.

After selling everything she owned and checking into rehab, Cathryn was told by the doctors that recovery was highly unlikely. Yet to everyone's amazement, she proved them wrong.

Coming Clean is a poignant, vivid and honest memoir of a woman's struggle with, and subsequent victory over, her demons. It is a love story, a horror story, a survival story, and one that shows the very real dangers of the over-prescription of painkillers.

About the Author

Cathryn Kemp is an award-winning journalist and author. She has written across the spectrum of the British press, both tabloid and broadsheet, and online, and for many magazines. In 2002 she won the Peter Wilson Award for Journalism before running her own, highly successful press agency writing for radio and television. She is the author of Painkiller Addict, published by Piatkus in 2012, which won the Big Red Read Prize for non-fiction in 2013. This is a personal and lovingly crafted account of her grandmother's life and her legacy.