She spent 13 days on a crack, alcohol and cigarette binge that should have left her for dead.

And when Rickeesha Binns woke up one morning and saw a skeleton staring back at her from the mirror, the 31-year-old realised she needed help.

Now the former Berkeley student who lost both parents when she was still in her teens, credits religion and prayer with her recovery.

Ms. Binns is now preparing for marriage with her fiance of two years who she met in her recovery programme, in LeGrange, Georgia. And she is enrolling in Spelman College, in Atlanta, to complete a Bachelors in Social Work so that she can bring her vision of a four-year recovery college to the Island.

Speaking to The Royal Gazette, Ms. Binns stressed the importance of filling the void left from drugs and alcohol abuse with God.

She said: "I used to make $2,500 a week, I had a car. I had a nice place to stay. I had clothes galore, shoes galore, but I just wasn't happy.

"I have lost material things, but now I have better relationships with my friends and family. I know how to love and I owe it all to God.

"I thank him for favour. I am being put in the right places at the right times. Like my nana said 'make your friends before you need them'.

"It has put me in the company of powerful people. Those people are going to be very key. I have allowed those people to see me."

And that is why she tells her story — to try and teach people about how she made it past an addiction that led her to prostitution, a $3,000 crack cocaine a week habit and wasting away.

"My bravery and boldness is all from Him. I could never have made it without Him. I should be dead, when I look back on it all.

"But God kept me so I can share Him with whomever crosses my path. And so that people can realise that He will never forsake us and that His mercy is all we need to get past the shame and guilt."

The daughter of Peggy Binns and father Ricky Anderson, Ms. Binns lost both her parents when she was just a teenager trying to study at Allen University, in South Carolina.

Her mother died in a motorcycle accident, while her father finally passed after suffering with AIDS for years in 1995.

But it was the death of her grandfather after Easter in 1996 that set her on the downward spiral.

After two years at college, where Ms. Binns was raped, she had to return to the Island because her grandmother could no longer support the tuition.

From working in the Trimingham's warehouse to Cellular Centre, Ms. Binns finally worked up the courage to take her singing to the stage.

But what was a talent her mother saw in her at a young age, quickly helped her grow the drinking and drugs problem she started while in college abroad.

"I never let myself grieve. With my mom I had time to prepare because she was in the hospital for a month. She was a live wire. She knew I could sing because I could. She would tell me 'Keesha sing that song'.

"Now she's not here to see me do my thing.

"Drugs started. Smoking and drinking like all the time (in college). Then when I came back here and I found ecstasy I was like this is the bomb. That was the end.

"The day I got married I quit it. Before I started doing crack I was smoking pot. I know now that the enemy (Satan) had to get me at my weakest.

"The drinking continued because I was singing. I have to have a drink because I had a problem with nerves. I used to have three shots of tequila because that's how frightening it was.

"It seemed like forever (use of crack). We (Ms. Binns and a new boyfriend) had money, time and resources so we were coming up to $3,000 to $4,000 a week."

By 2003 though, Ms. Binns said she had finally had enough. She was waking up in homes that were not hers and was selling herself on the streets.

"I knew I was on my way out cause I was in the point where I would have rocks (crack) in my hand and I wouldn't want to smoke it cause I was just disgusted.

"Just imagine being around people who haven't bathed for three or four days. I would wake up in a house where it could be anybody's house.

"It became scary. I didn't feel like selling myself. My world of prostitution started the first year I started smoking.

"Gigs began to die down as they usually do. Instead of singing maybe six nights a week, we'd perform maybe three nights a week. From making $3,150.00 a week, it dropped to $600 a week. Now not working, how else was I going to support a $3,000 a week habit.

"We came up with different scams to support our habit, but these scams as all scams usually do ran out. Therefore, leaving me to a world of prostitution. I remember waking up this one day I just needed a hit. I didn't want to sell myself.

"There was a time when I would never sell myself cause I thought I was better than that. There was a girl who went with a dude for $8. I looked down on her.

"The first time, I felt so dirty. I remember finding this loofah sponge and I was scrubbing so hard. It was horrible. It was so horrible. Then it was hard. Then it was work. But I got back to say if I had stayed I would have been that $8 crack ho."

Ms. Binns said the answer finally came in the form of the Fellowship Deliverance Ministries, run by Pastor Max Riley, of Southampton, Bermuda.

There she found her deliverance in the Lord, which she now credits with keeping her going even as she finds herself slipping.

She added: "It's (when you're addicted) not that you don't love yourself. It's not that you don't love your family. There's only one way out.

"You are wasting your time if you are not getting with your higher power. When you turn away from something you have to fill that hole with something else.

"It's (the higher power) the only thing you can grab and it doesn't hurt you."