Geordie Shore star Holly Hagan has spoken for the first time about the moments that led up to the death of her sister Darci Rose aged 19.
The 33-year-old first shared the news in October that her half-sister had died, in a post on Instagram.
She has now spoken about the moment she woke in the middle of the night to 130 missed calls and her mum’s text message urging her to get to Manchester Royal Infirmary.
Darci suffered an accidental drug overdose, dying just 48 hours after taking crystal MDMA at Manchester’s Warehouse Project nightclub.
In a new interview with the Daily Mail, Holly described the unimaginable horror of seeing her sister in a hospital bed, covered in tubes and wires, with blood coming from her mouth and nose.
Darci’s eyes had been taped shut and Holly said her grieving mother’s screams will be ‘etched’ into her mind forever.
Holly told the publication: ‘I opened the curtain, and I have never seen anything like that in my life. I hope no parent or sibling ever has to see anything like that.
Darci had suffered two cardiac arrests since the overdose first started to take its terrible effect. A hospital brain scan subsequently delivered the devastating news that she was brain-dead.
The doctors then performed a series of tests on Darci to look for signs of life, including stopping her oxygen for 10 minutes to see if she would breathe independently, but she did not.
‘This will sound awful, but in a way, I can’t say glad, but it was a better option than there being some signs of life and for her to come out of that in a way that wouldn’t have been her, and she wouldn’t have any quality of life,’ said Holly.
‘That would have been so unbelievably difficult for everyone.
‘It being so final, there was nothing else anybody could do, it was closure. She was 100 per cent brain-dead. Sometimes I can say things too bluntly and it can come across in a weird way but unless you have experienced it, you have no idea how you’re going to react or feel. She died at 16:23.’
Holly said she went in the middle of the night to buy her sister new pyjamas and asked the hospital staff if they could brush her hair because Darci had £800 extensions done.
She even recorded Darci’s heartbeat on her phone as the family were given a final moment with her.
She said: ‘We were all there and we had an opportunity to say goodbye. My mam didn’t know how to leave the room because she knew it was the last time she was going to see her. Eventually, I dragged her out.
‘We were hearing words like ‘morgue’, my mam was just breaking down, her daughter was in a morgue, it was just absolutely horrendous.’
Holly said she has agonised about not sending Darci a text before her night out and has also had to face vicious comments online claiming Darci ‘deserved’ what happened because she took drugs.
The pregnant mother-of-one said: ‘She deserves compassion and empathy. She was a 19-year-old girl who made a mistake – and 90 per cent of the people in that club did the same thing and went home to their families the next day.’
She noted that Holly had never taken crystal MDMA before and likely wasn’t aware how much she had poured into her drink.
‘Her friends say she was always so sensible, she would never take a whole pill, she would take a quarter, and it was only at these kinds of events that she would do that,’ she said.
‘Her friend said there was still a lot left but if you have seen that drug before you know it comes in powder and there are rocks in there as well. What happened is possibly the bigger rocks had gone into her drink, and it still looked like there was a lot left in the bag, but it was enough for it to be an overdose.’
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