A couple of months back, Ant McPartlin from the famous duo Ant & Dec revealed that he had checked himself into rehab in order to deal with alcohol and prescription drug addiction.

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The good news is, he’s left rehab and is on the road to recovery. But that doesn’t mean that he’s forgotten the dark times of his addiction and he has now bravely decided to speak out and reveal the details of how he almost died from his battle with pain relief drugs.

Ant’s descent into addiction started after a knee operation in 2014, where he was required to take stronger and more addictive pain killers as the pain failed to go away. He recalls that the incident left him popping pills “willy nilly”:

I was at the point where anything — prescription drugs, non-prescription drugs — I would take. And take them with alcohol, which is ridiculous. The doctors told me, “You could have killed yourself”.

He described how he was initially prescribed co-codamol and codeine before the doctors moved him onto tramadol. Speaking about an episode of Saturday Night Takeaway, where he and Dec had to perform with Take That, he said:

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The pain I was in was just ridiculous.

I knew there was a dance routine involved. I took a load of stuff that day just to get through the day. And I couldn’t feel anything on the night. But that did a lot of damage.

After his tramadol prescription ended, Ant said he found no problem getting more pain killers from private doctors, leading to his descent into addiction where he binged on tramadol, morphine and alcohol.

I was insane. It sends you crazy. It was to the point of hearing things, seeing things in the garden and still the pain was getting worse.

I was depressed through the whole thing because I was in pain and immobile.

It wasn’t until June that he finally admitted to his wife, Lisa, and Dec that he had a problem.

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As said, this story has a happy ending and now that Ant has finished rehab, he is set to return to work alongside Dec on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in November.

It’s a brave move from Ant to admit his problem – this is something that can take decades for many addicts to confess to, but he decided to nip it in the bud after two years of suffering. It’s great that Ant’s on the mend and even better that Dec has got his other half back. I bet those two missed each other – it doesn’t seem right when they’re apart.