'My £160-a-day laughing gas binges left me with dead zones in my brain and unable to walk'

A barmaid suffered brain damage after daily binges left her learning to walk again.

Rachel Kelly started dabbling with laughing gas at 21 but by the time she was 29, in 2023, Rachel, from Chicago, confessed she was spending £163 every day for eight two-litre canisters of the stuff.

Startling snaps depict her inhaling directly from a cylinder, which she said could be picked up without fuss from shops close by. During one busy spell behind the bar in April 2024, her feet and right mitt went dead, but a trip to only got her tagged with muscle twitches.

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Rachel's condition swiftly spiralled as she lost the knack of walking – her nerves 'kicked the bucket' and her bod 'collapsed. ' After painstaking rehabilitation and vitamin B12 shots, the now-receptionist has bounced back.

It's been over a calendar year since she last took a hit of nitrous oxide, and she's come forward with her tale, hoping it'll serve as a cautionary stand against the risks involved. Rachel recollected: "I was first introduced to nitrous oxide in 2018 at an EDM show which is like base, rave music. I was bartending in a bar right next to a venue and it was very big.

"I was 21 at the time, The high lasted a really short time and it just made me feel out of it. In 2022, I started working at the bar again and everyone had started to take nitrous oxide through these tanks. A lot of people take it out of the balloons as a safety method so you don't get frostbite but I was just hitting it straight out the nozzle. The biggest part for me is that the nitrous oxide was so accessible to me.

"[In 2023], I was using about eight of the two-litre tanks a day so I think I averaged spending around $220 a day on them, sometimes more. [At a shift in April 2024], my hips felt really tight. People thought I was drunk and I seemed intoxicated as it [the nitrous oxide] was poisoning my brain. My feet and right hand were completely numb and it felt like my hips were broken and I could barely walk."

While possession of nitrous oxide remains legal, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expressly banned its sale for human inhalation purposes.

Following her ordeal, where Rachel spent 10 days hospitalised, she moved to rehab for intensive occupational and physical therapy - a gruelling month of 30 hours weekly sessions. She confides that she had to retrain herself to walk, write, and manage simple tasks such as cleaning her teeth.

Post-rehab, Rachel continued her recovery at her parents', aided by ongoing therapy and the reliance on a walker for an additional five months. Rachel recounted her harrowing experience: "I lost the ability to function in the hospital. I couldn't hold my phone and I couldn't go to the bathroom and had to catheterize myself. All the nerves in my body that you don't think about [weren't working]. I couldn't go to the toilet on my own."

She explained the underlying cause: "The nitrous that they're selling you is not cut with oxygen so it stops your body from producing B12 which is a vitamin which helps protect the myelination of your spine and nerves so all of mine had died and my body was just shutting down."

Describing her agony, she said: "My nerves were firing on and off as they were dying so it felt like muscle spasms. For the first couple of days, I just watched my body lose all function. I then woke up the next day and couldn't walk."

Even after more than a year, Rachel is still struggling with the after-effects, having to take oral B12 supplements and suffering numbness in some of her toes. She's determined to work as a drug support worker and pleads with others to avoid inhaling nitrous oxide, insisting that 'the 30-second high is not worth it'.

In a stern warning, Rachel remarked: "I now have a bunch of dead zones in my brain and these don't come back. It's like rat poison. Since coming out [of hospital] I haven't touched nitrous oxide again and I wouldn't do now. Just because something is sold in a store, doesn't mean it is safe to use. They will sell it to you until you can't pee on your own."

Concluding her cautionary tale, she highlighted the unavoidable consequences: "The end stage of this is you will end up in the hospital and it's just a [matter of] when this will happen to you and when you will wake up and not be able to feel anything."