Jackie ‘O’ Henderson has revealed that she’s ‘lucky to be alive’ after taking dozens of pills a day during her battle with addiction.
The radio host, 49, recently confessed she took around 10-12 Stilnox/Ambien sleeping pills and 24 Panadeine Forte painkillers a day before seeking help.
‘I mean, that’s a lot of sleeping pills just for a start. A lot of people think, how did she even function?’ she tells the Mental As Anyone podcast this week.
‘My body just built up a tolerance to them, so I may as well have been taking one or two with the way they were affecting me,’ Jackie continued.
‘The 10 just wasn’t, I think it was honestly just bringing my body to an even keel in a way. That’s just an awful lot for the body to take.
‘When you look at the actual medication I was taking, I don’t know how I survived that’.
Jackie ‘O’ Henderson (pictured) has revealed that she’s ‘lucky to be alive’ after taking dozens of pills a day during her battle with addiction
The radio host, 49, spoke about her years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction for the first time in her memoir, The Whole Truth, last month.
She told how she spent 28 days in the famous rehab clinic, The Betty Ford Center, in November 2022 after struggling with addiction during the Covid lockdown.
After overcoming her addiction struggles, Jackie has now told how she is marking her two years of sobriety on Thursday, November 14, in a milestone achievement.
Speaking to Daily Mail Australia at Marie Claire’s Women of the Year Awards, Jackie revealed how she intends to mark the occasion with her friends.
‘I think we will go out for dinner and celebrate, for sure,’ Jackie proudly shared.
The media personality also confessed she had forgotten she was approaching the notable date, with her best friend Gemma O’Neill having to remind her about it.
Walking the red carpet with Jackie, Gemma shared: ‘I reminded you this morning and you were like, ”oh, is it?”’
She went on to gush over the support that she has received since her memoir’s release and thanked her fans for trusting her with their own addiction stories.
‘When you look at the actual medication I was taking, I don’t know how I survived that,’ she said
‘I didn’t know what to expect to be honest, the reaction has been really amazing and it’s just so nice having so many people reaching out and sharing their stories with me, I’ve been so grateful for that,’ she said.
‘People are trusting me with something they don’t tell many people in their life, so from that aspect it’s been beautiful.’
Jackie also revealed she pre-warned some people – including her ex-husbands Lee and Phil O’Neil – about the contents of her tell-all memoir as not to ‘blindside’ them.
‘I wanted to be respectful to people – obviously my daughter [Kitty], and my mum and even my ex-husbands – so I didn’t want to blindside them,’ she said.
‘There were no huge surprises for the people that I warned anyway.’
In her memoir, Jackie told how she spiralled into a deep addiction following the 2018 breakdown of her marriage to UK photographer Lee and again during the Covid-19 lockdown.
But her struggles first began more than 15 years ago, when she was prescribed a strong opioid painkiller for endometriosis – a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, causing severe pain.
‘I got prescribed that and I found myself at the time taking it more than I needed and I recognised that this might be a bit of a problem, so I stopped at the time,’ she said.
The radio host, 49, spoke about her years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction for the first time in her memoir, The Whole Truth, last month
However, Jackie then went back to the medication after her turbulent split from Lee, who she shares her daughter Kitty, 13, with.
‘I went back to it as a way to kind of go to some happy please, and it was a way of escaping and it was so the wrong thing to do,’ she confessed.
Jackie said she started taking a few codeine ‘here and there’ and one Stilnox at night with a glass of wine, which she described as a ‘blackout’ situation.
‘You can still be awake and have no idea what’s going on,’ Jackie shared.
‘It’s like you’re kind of functioning but you have no memory.’
What really ‘kickstarted’ Jackie’s harrowing addiction was isolating at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she said she was ‘struggling’ and felt ‘so sad’.
‘The dosage started to creep up more and more and it got extreme and I was averaging about 24 Panadeine Forte a day and then I was averaging about 10 to 12 Stilnox,’ she shared.
She kept her addiction battle a secret from her loved ones, saying she had long Covid when she took an extended absence from work in November 2022 to check into The Betty Ford Clinic in California.
Apologising to her listeners, she tearfully admitted she ‘lied’ by ‘omission’ when she publicly shared on her radio show that she was battling long Covid at the time.
‘I want to apologise to our listeners and everyone in my life where I haven’t sort of been forthcoming with this, I just needed to concentrate on that part first, that recovery for the first year particularly,’ she said.
