A PROFESSIONAL woman who was told she had a 50/50 chance of developing a life-threatening disease got drunk the following day and crashed her car, magistrates in Swindon heard.

Megan Alexandra Huish, 25, of Edencroft, Highworth, pleaded guilty to drink driving in December last year. The level of alcohol in her blood was 165 milligrammes. The legal limit is 80mg.

Keith Ballinger, prosecuting, told the magistrates that on the afternoon of December 20 police received a report of a crash in Station Road, Highworth. When they arrived they found a woman wandering around saying she was sorry.

There was bad damage to the front of a stationary VW Polo, a lamppost was bent and damaged and there was further damage to a garage.

They called an ambulance and Huish was taken to hospital, where samples of her blood were taken.

Huish told police she had driven just about a quarter of a mile on the way to her house.

“I was so stupid, I just wanted to get home,” she said.

When interviewed later she fully accepted that she had been driving the car but the first thing she remembered was being woken by a man saying they had called an ambulance.

She said that the day before she had been at the funeral of her grandmother who had died of Huntingdon's disease. She had been told that her father was also a sufferer and that there was a 50/50 chance she too would develop the disease.

She said she had gone to a friend’s house where she had shared a bottle of wine and drunk a third of a bottle of Jack Daniel's and Coke.

Mark Glendenning, defending, said Huish was an accountant in a full-time job and had never been in any kind of trouble before.

After learning that she was likely to develop the disease that ran in her family she had gone out to have a drink with a friend and had blotted her copybook.

The bench disqualified Huish from driving for 20 months, fined her £402 and ordered her to pay £85 court costs and a victim surcharge of £40.