While looking back on the highs and lows of her life in a new memoir, Christine Brown Woolley shares a raw confession about her past experience with oxycodone addiction.
In her book, titled “Sister Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Family and Finding Freedom,” the “Sister Wives” star recalled undergoing knee surgery to repair a torn ACL and meniscus. She got the procedure done right before Janelle and Kody Brown’s daughter, Maddie Brown Brush, got married in 2016.
Following the procedure, Brown Woolley said that Kody Brown filled a prescription for pain medication and left her to navigate her recovery.
“I had never taken oxycodone before — if something hurt, I took ibuprofen or aspirin,” she wrote in her memoir.
Three days after the surgery, she began to feel miserable and was “achy from head to toe.”
“I took an oxycodone, and all the symptoms went away,” she described.
Brown Woolley soon discovered that the medication gave her “the best high” she had ever felt.
“I was on top of the world and I could accomplish everything!” she wrote, adding that she began taking a pill before driving to the interview set of “Sister Wives” so she would “feel great on set.”
“Oxy made the set fine. I could do anything on oxy,” she said. “About 45 minutes later, I would feel the low coming and I’d feel so sad.”
For the next two weeks, Brown Woolley followed a cycle of highs and lows until Brown Brush confronted her about her behavior.
“‘I miss you—we all miss you. We all need you back, so whatever you’re doing, figure it out,’” Brown Woolley recalled her daughter saying.
After telling Kody Brown that she had a problem, Brown Woolley broke her pills in half and gave half of them to her daughter Aspyn Thompson, since she knew it would be “mortifying to have to ask her for more.”
When she started taking the half doses, Brown Woolley said she stopped getting the same high and low cycle. Soon, she gave her mom the rest of the medication to take to the pharmacy to dispose of them. Brown Woolley described herself as being so “unbalanced” for around six months after that.
“I didn’t feel like me, and all I wanted was oxycodone. I couldn’t get it, and that made me angry. I knew I would never feel that high again. It was that fast to become addicted, and then that long to find myself again,” she wrote.
Brown Woolley decided to open up to her children about her oxycodone addiction.
“If it could happen to me, it could happen to them, and what kind of mom would I be if I didn’t warn them?” she wrote.
Brown Woolley said she credits Brown Brush with snapping her back to reality.
“I don’t know what might have happened if Maddie hadn’t felt comfortable coming to me—if we hadn’t had all those years of sitting on the couch and talking about everything from lost teeth to first kisses,” she wrote. “And I don’t know if I would have been strong enough to get out of it if I hadn’t already discovered that I loved myself enough to want me back.”