Recovering alcoholic Fiona O’Loughlin recalls drinking hand sanitiser during her shocking relapse

Recovering alcoholic Fiona O’Loughlin has revealed that she fell off the wagon while filming I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! in 2018.

The comedian, 57, told The Daily Telegraph she had even resorted to drinking hand sanitiser because alcohol was unavailable in the South African jungle.

While her relapse wasn’t caught on camera, producers realised what was going on when they noticed her slurred speech just a few days before she was crowned the winner of the series.

Fiona, who has candidly discussed her alcoholism battle in the past, explained that the pressure of being in the public eye became too much for her to handle.

‘My mind started playing games with me. It felt so real, and it is so nonsensical now, but I felt that I was the schmuck and everyone in Australia was laughing at me. I didn’t know what was being edited and what was out there,’ she said.

Looking for a way out of her emotional turmoil, Fiona ‘freaked’ and decided to drink hand sanitiser while her campmates slept.

She explained: ‘I just f**king did it. It was disappointing because first, the taste is so vile, it takes so long to get the taste out of your mouth, and then I think you get about 10 minutes of numbness, which is what I was after, and then you sleep.’

Fiona added that she replaced alcohol with hand sanitiser on more than one occasion during filming.

Once the producers worked out what was happening, Fiona was treated by doctors for a few days and the decision was made to allow her to stay in the competition.

Much to Fiona’s surprise, she ended up winning the series and raised $100,000 for Angel Flight, a charity which coordinates non-emergency flights to assist country people to access specialist medical treatment that would otherwise be unavailable to them because of vast distance and high travel costs.

The mother of five told The Daily Telegraph that despite approaching one year of sobriety, she will ‘always have an alcoholic mind’. 

‘It is a cunning, powerful and baffling disease. What I do every single day is just not have that first drink. You can’t get drunk if you don’t have the first drink.’

Fiona’s relapse during the jungle-based adventure show will be discussed further in her upcoming tell-all autobiography, Truths From An Unreliable Witness – Finding Darkness In the Darkest Of Places.

During her battle with alcoholism, Fiona tried to commit suicide three times – and one attempt even left her in a coma for four weeks.

The mother-of-five was left homeless at one point, before turning her life around during a five-month stint in rehab.