Danniella Westbrook's bones are "rotting away" in her face.
Danniella Westbrook
The 44-year-old former cocaine addict cannot bear to look at herself in the mirror after she was left with a "sunken" left side of her face with her bones "decaying" after years of drug use and botched surgery on a TV show.
The former 'EastEnders' actress has developed osteoporosis and is now drinking "12 pints of milk a day" to improve her bone density in the hope she can have reconstructive surgery.
She told Mirror Online: "I just don't look like myself any more.
"Obviously I'm going to age a lot faster anyway because of the drugs but I didn't need this as well.
"Some days I wake up and I'm so swollen and other days it can look really sunken.
"It's getting weaker and weaker and some days the pain is unbelievable,
"They need to take a piece of bone out of my skull and put a plate into my face but they've got nothing to stick the plate on at the minute because the bone's not strong enough.
"They can start to rebuild it but I'll never look the same and it could make me look not very nice, even worse than I look now."
Danniella admits she would "probably be dead" if it wasn't for the Royal London Hospital saving her life when she had septicaemia in 2016.
She said: "I did nearly die, I had two lots of IV drips in each side and then they took all my teeth out again and gave me this denture which has broken my heart because I didn't need all of my teeth out in the first place."
While years of drug abuse previously caused her septum to cave in, the former 'Hollyoaks' star insists her health problems, which include a "disintegrating" shoulder due to her osteoporosis spreading, are not just drug-related.
She added: "I struggle with putting my arm up on this shoulder because the joints are really bad because the bone in this shoulder is disintegrating because it travels through the body. I'm going to end up with arthritis through it as well.
"The thing that makes me most unhappy is everyone goes, 'It's coke'. I'm like, 'Listen if it was coke, I'd be like yeah it's coke'. But this is not my fault, it's down to the TV show that I've got bad teeth."
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