Nick Carter: I Don't Want to Die

During the decade boy-band heart-throb Nick Carter spent abusing drugs and alcohol - typically downing half a bottle of hard liquor a night, often followed by what he calls a "bump" of cocaine - there wasn't anythingh that could make him stop. Not a 2002 arrest after a Florida bar brawl or a 2005 arrest for DUI. Not his ballooning weight, which shot up to 224 lbs in 2006, or the self-loathing he felt after a May 2008 trip to Russia, when he competed with locals to see who could down the most Sambuca. "There were things happening, proving that maybe what I was doing was out of control, all sorts of crazy stuff," Carter admits. "But every time those red flags would come up, I'd appease people in my inner circle and make them think everything was alright."

Even when it became clear that everything was most definitely not all right - last spring, during the European leg of the Backstreet Boys' tour, he began experiencing a mild discomfort in his chest - Carter would not stop partying. "I was thinking, 'Something is physically wrong with me,'" says the 29-year-old singer, who in June went to Ft. Lauderdale cardiologist Richard Polakoff for two days of medical testing. But the night before his results were due back, "I went out and I just went nuts," he recalls, staring out at the Pacific Ocean through the windows of his high-rise condo in Santa Monica. "I drank so much and did a bunch of blow. I felt like I was trying to kill myself - because I didn't want to get the results."

Carter had good reason to be afraid: The years of abusing his body had left a buildup of toxins in his heart, weakening the muscle so that had difficulty pumping blood. This condition, known as cardiomyopathy (see box), is the same one that led to the death of singer Andy Gibb and killed actor Chris Penn - and Carter learned it could kill him as well if he didn't get clean and sober. "My doctor said, 'You need to change your lifestyle. I don't want you to end up like that,'" Carter says. "I was like, 'I don't want to end up like that either.'"

In the eight months since his diagnosis, Carter has indeed taken dramatic steps to turn his life around. He has lost more than 30 lbs. (see box) and - with the exception of a few slips early on - stopped drinking and doing drugs. "I don't want to die," he says. "I don't want to be that person people read about and think, 'That's sad that he couldn't stop it and killed himself.'"

Yet Carter admits that committing to a clean lifestyle remains a daily challenge, perhaps because his self-destructive behavior was a lifetime in the making. The oldest of five children born to Robert, 56, and Jane, 49, Carter says alcohol was always around when he was growing up in Jamestown, N.Y., where his family owned a bar called the Rebel Yell. "If you want me to be honest, I had my first drink when I was 2 years old," says Carter.

Easy access to alcohol was only part of the story. As revealed on the short-lived E! reality show "House of Carters," family life for Carter and his siblings - Bobbie Jean, 27, Leslie, 22, and twins Aaron and Angel, 21 - was tumultous. "There was a ton of fighting between my mother and father," he says. "The kids would be thrown into the middle, to choose sides." The dysfunction only intensified after Carter found success as "the cute one" in the Backstreet Boys, which he joined at age 12. "Fame is a lot of pressure, especially when you're responsible for your entire family," he says. "Financially, emotionally - everything."

And while he was out touring the world, his home life was falling apart. Not only his parents' marriage breaking down, but rumors - never proven - had started to surface that the Backstreet Boys' former manager Lou Pearlman was behaving inappropriately with some of his boy-band charges. (In 2007 Jane Carter told 'Vanity Fair' that "certain things happened and it almost destroyed our family" but stopped short of specifying how it affected Carter, who did not want to discuss Pearlman with PEOPLE.)

SOURCE: People Mag | Thanks to misha_bsb for the script