Whakaari/White Island eruption survivor Kelsey Waghorn has appeared on the podcast hosted by British TV personality and former SAS trooper Anthony Middleton to recount her horrifying ordeal.

Kelsey was candid about her recovery and her challenges with PTSD during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Twenty-two people – mainly tourists on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship – died when the volcanic island off the Bay of Plenty erupted on December 9, 2019.

The death toll also included two Kiwi tour guides, Tipene Maangi and Hayden Marshall-Inman.

Twenty-five others were badly injured in the disaster.

Best known as the heavily muscled, military-trained host of SAS: Who Dares Win, Anthony had his own brush with death when he summited Mount Everest.

He has spoken out about how it was his “psychological understanding that helped [him] survive” and now he hosts the podcast Head Game to help others share how they did the same.

She says she was often referred to as the “drill sergeant” by her colleagues, which came to fruition during the eruption as she barked orders at the wounded.

“Someone says ‘I am really hurt I can’t move’ and I just yelled ‘So am I come on’.

“Because we survived the unsurvivable, it never crossed my mind that we could die.”

She was whisked to the nearest hospital and then again to Wellington Hospital where she was placed into an induced coma.

Kelsey told Anthony - a decorated former British SAS soldier who has also written a series of motivational books - that for the next four weeks she was heavily medicated, hallucinating and unaware of the horrors that occurred on the island.

She says she was only told a month later when she asked about a close friend and colleague Hayden, not making it off the island.

Kelsey Waghorn was just 25 years old and working as a tour guide on New Zealand’s Whakaari White Island, when the volcano erupted and her life changed forever.

Check the link below or link in my biohttps://t.co/eQU1IbJNDj#elitemindset #HeadGame pic.twitter.com/dGDCTfPAmX

— Ant Middleton (@antmiddleton) May 8, 2024

His body has never been recovered.

“But I made it, that’s ridiculous, of course he made it,” she told her mum in disbelief.

Anthony asked about her mindset upon hearing the news while hospitalised with full-thickness burns to 45 per cent of her body.

“[I was] devastated,” Kelsey says.

“I kind of had a feeling but I refused to believe it.”

She says Hayden’s funeral took place while she was still in her coma so his death “didn’t feel real”.

A light-hearted conversation she had on the morning of the fateful day about which group should go first haunted her while she recovered.

“I said I was fastest... I told him I doubted he could keep up with me and he said he would go second so he could push me if we were going to slow,” Kelsey says.

She says she suffered the most mentally when the Covid pandemic hit and she was separated from her family for three weeks.

“It destroyed me,” Kelsey says.

Then a year on from the eruption, she says PTSD started “infiltrating her entire life”.

“It had taken the wheel and taken over my entire life,” Kelsey says.

“Uncontrollable fits of rage, I was just so absolutely numb... I was always prepared to run.

Kelsey says the psychological injuries were much harder to recover from compared to the physical injuries, but she is making major strides in both areas after having her last surgery in July last year.

“Thankfully I found help and now I am the happiest I have been in my life.”

Rachel Maher is an Auckland-based reporter who covers breaking news. She has worked for the Herald since 2022.

-Rachel Maher, NZ Herald