Christine Brown Reveals ‘Devastating’ Oxycodone Addiction

The Sister Wives star reveals in her new book, Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom, that she got hooked on the drug after she “blew out” her knee, tearing her ACL and meniscus and requiring surgery. She was still married to Kody Brown at the time, saying he brought her home from surgery and he then “prepared to leave,” before she asked him about aftercare instructions.

“They didn’t give you any instructions?’ ‘No,’ he said. But he had gotten my prescription for pain pills filled, and he handed me the bag,” she recalled. “My mom and daughters stayed to help. I had never taken oxycodone before — if something hurt, I took ibuprofen or aspirin. 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.”

Feeling achy and like she had the flu, “all the symptoms went away” after she took the oxy, writing that it “gave me the best high I ever felt.” She added, “I was on top of the world, and I could accomplish everything … Oh, I thought. I’m not taking this for my knee anymore. I’m taking it because I’m achy everywhere.”

She would even take it while filming her family’s reality TV series, before shooting her confessionals.

“I lived about two minutes away from the interview set, so I could take an oxycodone just before I left, drive to work before it hit and then feel great on set. Oxy made the set fine. I could do anything on oxy,” wrote Brown, who added that she could “feel the low coming” when she started to come down from her high. “All I could do was think about the next hit and it was hours away,” she added.

It was one of the kids in the family, Janelle Brown’s daughter Maddie, who confronted her about her drug problem. Per Christine, Maddie — now 29 — told her, “You’re a mess. I miss you — we all miss you. We all need you back, so whatever you’re doing, figure it out.”

At the time, Maddie was getting ready to marry her now-husband Caleb Brush and Christine vowed to kick her addiction before the 2016 wedding. To do that, she told her husband about her problem, broke the pills in half and gave half of them to her daughter Aspyen, knowing “it would be mortifying to have to ask her for more.” She then began weaning herself off the drug.

“I never had the high again and I never had the low,” she wrote in the book. “After about a week of that, Kody took all of the young girls out of town, and I spent the weekend in bed sobbing, watching Pretty Woman over and over and sobbing. I couldn’t handle my life, I couldn’t handle anything. My mom stayed with me and took care of me. At the end, I gave the rest of the oxycodone to my mom.”

Speaking with PEOPLE about her addiction, she said she “dealt with it privately because at the time, it was absolutely devastating.”

“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 told the outlet. “I didn’t feel okay for so long. So, once I was done and I felt better, I just felt good to feel better.”

She said she wasn’t “in a place where I could talk about it on the show,” saying her addiction was “so personal, and it was so embarrassing,” she wasn’t ready for others to know about it until now.

Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Finding Freedom is available now.