Christine Brown has been sharing her personal life on Sister Wives for 19 seasons, though she just recently revealed her secret struggle amid her oxycodone addiction.
In her new memoir, Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom, Christine, 53, explained that she began taking oxycodone after she was prescribed it following an injury.
“Just before Maddie [Brown] and Caleb [Brush] got married [in 2016], I blew out my knee. I tore my ACL and my meniscus, and I had to have surgery. [My husband at the time] Kody [Brown] brought me home from the hospital and then prepared to leave,” she wrote in the book, per People.
After Christine noted she was “wondering about meds and aftercare,” she said she wasn’t given any “instructions.” However, Kody, 56, had gotten her “prescription for pain pills filled, and he handed me the bag.”
“My mom and daughters stayed to help. I had never taken oxycodone before — if something hurt, I took ibuprofen or aspirin,” she recalled. “Real pain indicates that something’s wrong, and if I take something that masks the problem, I’m not going to fix the problem, so I generally avoid it. With the surgery, I had already fixed the problem, and it hurt, so I took my meds.”
Christine said that she felt like she “had the flu” and was “achy from head to toe.” Due to her discomfort, she “took an oxycodone, and all the symptoms went away.”
“It gave me the best high I ever felt. I was on top of the world, and I could accomplish everything!” she wrote of the medication.
After sharing her addiction struggles in the book, Christine explained why she chose to keep that part of her life off of the TLC show. “I just dealt with it privately because at the time, it was absolutely devastating,” she told People in an interview published on Tuesday, September 2.
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“It was very difficult, and even though I was on it for a month, the effects of it lasted at least six. I didn’t feel normal,” she said. “I didn’t feel okay for so long. So, once I was done and I felt better, I just felt good to feel better. And I realized that with writing the book, that’s something I didn’t go back and revisit was the addiction to oxycodone.”
She went on to call the medication “a terrible, addictive thing” that shouldn’t be used if it’s not needed.
“If you need it and you’re in a lot of pain, there’s nothing better than that, but since I can get addicted to things easily, it seems it’s just best to stay away from that kind of thing,” she explains. “But I just wasn’t in a place where I could talk about it on the show. I just really couldn’t. It was so personal, and it was embarrassing, and I didn’t know if I wanted people to know that about me.”
