Having been kind enough to offer to drop Philly Lay’s daughters at their private prep school one morning, her friend decided to pop her head around the bedroom door as the girls said goodbye to their mother.

Nothing could have prepared her for the sight that came.

There was Philly, the epitome of middle-class respectability in her exquisitely decorated detached townhouse, sitting up in bed, washing down a handful of heavy-duty painkillers with a bottle of sauvignon blanc.

It was 8am.

She didn’t even bother to hide it, and nor did the girls – then ten and 12 – see anything unusual, either. This was everyday life for Philly who, at the time, was heavily addicted to opioids following back surgery and drinking up to three bottles of wine a day.

‘I was completely out of it, all of the time,’ she recalls.

‘Looking back I feel deep shame but 11 years ago I honestly didn’t know how to get through the day without drugs or alcohol. Everything a mother usually does – cooking, laundry, school runs, were now being done by the au pair, or friends.

‘I can’t even remember that scene in the bedroom, so I’ve no idea how my friend reacted, or what she thought. She only recently reminded me of it, which just adds to my shame.’

Before her descent into addiction, Philly had an enviable life. Married to Danny, an executive in the toy and games industry, she juggled a successful career as a property developer and interior designer with baking cakes, helping with homework and ferrying her children to after-school activities from their home in upmarket Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.

But a terrible chain of events led to Philly, now 61, becoming a most unlikely drug addict. And she warns it’s something that, with the widespread availability of opioids – so called because they derive from, or mimic, highly addictive substances found in opium poppy plants – could happen to anyone.

The most recent UK figures show a five-fold increase in prescriptions issued to patients for codeine, seven-fold for tramadol and 30-fold for oxycodone between 2006 and 2017. These figures do not include prescriptions for those suffering from cancer and needing the drugs for pain control.

Alarming figures indeed, given that up to 12 per cent of patients given opiates for chronic pain will develop an addiction and struggle to come off the drugs.

This is what happened to Philly.

For years she had been suffering from back pain, which doctors put down to a prolapsed disc – the cause of which was unknown. She managed the pain with morphine patches, until one horrific day in early 2014, aged 50, when the pain got so bad she temporarily lost the use of her legs and control of her bladder.

Terrified, she was blue-lighted to a private hospital in Oxford where an emergency spinal fusion was performed, in which the bottom disc in her spine was taken out and replaced with a metal cage.

Performed under general anaesthetic, the normal procedure is for an epidural ‘spinal block’ to also be inserted before she was put under, to numb the pain when she came round.

Yet waking up in her recovery room seven hours later, Philly opened her eyes and was hit by a pain so intense that she will ‘never forget the blood-curdling scream’ she let out.

While the surgery was deemed a success, the epidural had been wrongly positioned – leaving her in agony. The pain was so intense she lapsed into a critical, coma-like state for 24 hours.

Danny and their young daughters, Talya and Sassy, were summoned to her bedside, fearing the worst. ‘I’m certain it was hearing my children’s voices, telling me how much they loved me and that they didn’t want me to go that saved my life,’ says Philly.

She spent a week in hospital before being discharged with a bag-full of opioids, including morphine, tramadol and oxycodone. Oxycodone is the main ingredient in OxyContin, the drug responsible for an addiction epidemic in America, as featured in the TV series Dopesick and Painkiller.

She had six weeks to wait until her follow-up appointment with the consultant and was told to rest and recover. ‘I moved into the spare room and, other than to use the loo, I rarely got out of bed,’ she says.

‘I’d doze, wake up in agony and reach for the pills. The more I took the less effective they became, so I took more. In fact, I was often too out of it to remember what I’d taken and when.

‘It hurt to move or to lay still, and I couldn’t bear anyone, not even my children or my husband, to touch me, so tender was my whole body.’

Danny, along with everyone else, assumed she just needed time and things would improve, so kept ordering repeat prescriptions – thinking the doctors wouldn’t be issuing them if Philly didn’t need them.

‘The drugs always seemed to be by my bed, and I always seemed to be taking them,’ says Philly. ‘I soon found they worked an awful lot better with a bottle of wine, so I’d open my first in the morning, a second in the afternoon and a third by the evening.

‘It meant I was comatose much of the day and night.’

Finally, her follow-up appointment arrived and a desperately worried Danny managed to get Philly into the car, hoping they would have some answers as to why she was still suffering so badly.

‘The pain on that journey, every pothole, every stop and start, was indescribable,’ recalls Philly. ‘As Danny helped me into the clinic the consultant said, “Oh gosh, it’s you. I will never forget that scream when we brought you round”.

‘Furious, I told him I would remember that scream until the day I die – and that the operation had been a “disaster”.’

Yet the consultant insisted the surgery had been ‘a complete success’ – it was just the epidural that had failed. The source of her pain could no longer be ascribed to her back. It had to come from somewhere else… but where?

With nine years of recovery under her belt, and the benefit of hindsight, Philly now believes the pain was a post-traumatic-shock response. But by that visit to the consultant she’d developed a serious opioid addiction, which almost eclipsed the pain.

‘The next two years are pretty much a blur,’ she admits. In such a state, she couldn’t contemplate bringing any civil claim against the hospital.

While deeply ashamed of how her life spiralled so spectacularly out of control, Philly says opioid addiction is far more widespread than many imagine.

‘These drugs are handed out far too easily,’ she says. ‘I’ve come across too many people who have been on repeat prescriptions for years.

‘After the surgery, I just didn’t want to live, though I would never have actually taken my own life and left my daughters. So, I did the next best thing which was to block everything out.’

Microwaved meals were delivered to her in bed. Wine was ordered online.

Danny would travel a lot for work and so the family relied heavily on au pairs, as well as local friends, to help.

Memories of lying in bed, weeping, as Talya’s friends sang happy birthday downstairs about a month after her surgery, will be forever etched on Philly’s memory.

Every other year she had made her daughter’s birthday cake – from Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan themes when she was little, to roller skates and even sushi in more recent times. But on her 13th she couldn’t even muster the strength to join the celebrations.

Shame, she recalls now, was what stopped her.

‘I didn’t want anyone to see me,’ says Philly. ‘I hadn’t had my hair done, or even washed, for some time. I struggled to walk – staying in bed all day, I got little exercise – and I’d gone from a size eight to a size 16.

‘I felt complete and utter self-loathing. It was a living nightmare from which I thought I’d never properly wake up.’

Danny and the girls were locked in their own nightmare too, with no idea what to do or how to ask for help.

Incredibly the pills kept coming, without any consultations with a doctor. Only Philly’s mother, Monica, who has since died, could see what was going on and spoke out.

‘Mum would visit with my sister and they would take me out into our garden, and I’d try to walk using Mum’s zimmer frame,’ Philly recalls. ‘She would ask me about the medication, how much I was taking, and I was always vague because I honestly didn’t keep track.

‘Then one day, when I was crying about what a hopeless mum I was and how little I was able to do, she looked me in the eyes, angrily, and said, “Philly, you will never get your life back while you’re on those painkillers”.’

This was two years after the surgery and, somehow, her mother’s words filtered through the thick, drug-induced fog in Philly’s head.

She asked Danny not to pick up her next prescription and decided to go ‘cold turkey’.

The horrors of this brutal, sudden withdrawal from drugs have been documented by former heroin addicts – yet rarely by ‘nice’, middle-class mothers such as Philly.

Yet today she can empathise with every fellow sufferer. ‘The next two months were the hardest of my life,’ she says. ‘My whole body ached, I had daily migraines, sweating, shaking, vomiting. I was too dizzy to stand up and could barely sleep.

‘It was utterly tortuous. Once I’d started, though, I knew that if my daughters were to become the centre of my world once more I had to get the drugs out of my system.’

Unable to tolerate the withdrawal symptoms without alcohol, however, Philly continued drinking three bottles of wine a day, telling herself that she would tackle her alcoholism once she was free of drugs.

In late 2016, with the drugs finally out of her system, Philly committed to going on a £2,400-a-week organic detox at a health and wellbeing retreat in Gozo, Malta, where she would not only be free of alcohol but also sugar and carbohydrates.

‘I remember my daughters saying, “That’s going to be really hard for you”,’ recalls Philly. ‘I knew it would too, but I reassured them I could do it and get back to being a proper mum.’

Philly managed to distract herself from the alcohol cravings with spa treatments, yoga and sessions with a therapist and wellbeing coach.

Meanwhile the relief of being somewhere so beautiful, after spending two years ‘like a prisoner’ in her bedroom, and ‘sheer bloody-minded determination’, spurred her on.

She returned from the week-long retreat a totally different person.

‘My pain levels were around an eight out of ten when I arrived and down to a three or four by the end of my stay. After six months, the pain had gone and I had full sensation in my legs again.’

Philly admits that, like so many addicts who trade one obsession for another, she became as hooked on clean-living as she had been on drink and drugs.

‘I cut out gluten and sugar and learnt about intermittent fasting and high-intensity exercise,’ she says.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, her relationship with Danny – under such unbearable strain for years – couldn’t be salvaged and in 2019 the couple agreed, amicably, to separate and divorce.

Since her recovery, Philly has spent the past few years spreading the word about the importance of looking after our minds and bodies.

She wrote her first book, The Natural Wellness Journal, and started a podcast, The Wellness Way, on which she interviews guests about holistic treatments. Next weekend, Philly is running The Wellness Way Festival, which she has invited many of her former podcast guests to present.

‘I want people to know that, no matter what, it’s never too late to heal yourself and your life,’ she says.

Her daughters are now 24 and 22, and memories of that time have faded – although Philly’s guilt hasn’t

‘I apologised to them both again, last night, for being a terrible mother over that period and they insisted, “You weren’t mum… you were ill”.

‘I know they’re right, that addiction is an illness – just not one I thought someone like me would fall victim to.’

• Philly J. Lay is running The Wellness Way festival in Wasing Park, near Reading, from August 8 to 10 (thewellnesswayfestival.com)  Follow her on @phillyjlay