Addict given a year to live turns her life around

Caroline Best has just celebrated one year clean

A prolific thief whose drug habit caused her heart to fail has thanked a PC who helped her turn her life around.

Caroline Best paid for her heroin and crack cocaine addiction by shoplifting - spending 20 years in and out of prison.

Even when doctors said she would die without a new heart valve, the 36-year-old carried on taking drugs.

Ms Best, from Birmingham, is now one year clean, and helping others after police offered her rehabilitation.

She said she started taking drugs at 13, and had tried coming off drugs but would always return to them.

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But a check by doctors on her swollen knee in January last year revealed she had sepsis which had infected her heart valve and she was diagnosed with endocarditis.

Medics at Heartlands Hospital told Ms Best, who was injecting both drugs every day, that they would not operate on her until she was clean.

Ms Best said she now enjoys helping others

An encounter with Erdington-based PC Stuart Toogood, of West Midlands Police, who had previously arrested Ms Best, enabled her to get on to a six-month rehabilitation programme in Walsall.

Ms Best has just celebrated 12 months clean and said she has changed her life.

Her programme was paid for from money recovered by the Proceeds of Crime Act.

She said: "Thanks to Stuart Toogood, I'm now a productive member of society and I thank him for helping me do something I couldn't do on my own.

"I am living proof that we can recover."

PC Stuart Toogood had previously arrested Ms Best