Sister Wives star Christine Brown opened up about her addiction to oxycodone after an injury, and she shared why she didn’t reveal it on camera. Christine also expressed her hope that her new memoir will help people in “relationships where they feel less than.”
Christine was the third of Kody Brown’s four wives, but she left him in 2021, 25 years after their spiritual wedding. She was the first wife to leave, followed by Janelle Brown and Meri Brown. Now, Robyn Brown is the last remaining wife.
In her recently released memoir, Sister Wife, Christine addressed her addiction to oxycodone.
“Just before Maddie and Caleb 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 said. “‘What do I need to do?’ I asked, wondering about meds and aftercare. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘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.”
“My mom and daughters stayed to help. I had never taken oxycodone before — if something hurt, I took ibuprofen or aspirin,” she went on. “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 she felt “achy from head to toe,” and it was also like she “had the flu.”
“[So I] took an oxycodone, and all the symptoms went away,” she said. “It gave me the best high I ever felt. I was on top of the world, and I could accomplish everything!”
“I just dealt with it privately [off camera] because at the time, it was absolutely devastating,” she added, speaking to the outlet. “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 … 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 shared that “oxy is a terrible, addictive thing if you don’t need it.”
“Since I can get addicted to things easily, it seems it’s just best to stay away from that kind of thing,” said the star. “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.”
As for her book, Christine said she hopes both men and women can relate to her story.
“I think there are a lot of people that were in situations like mine, men and women, and people just in general who were in, are in relationships where they feel less than, or they feel like their opinion doesn’t really matter, or they feel mistreated,” she said. “I feel like there’s so many people like that, and I think overall, what I would love is for people to realize that you got to find yourself, and you got to make sure that you live life for yourself … You got to make your decisions.”
“There were so many times where I would just kind of go along with the flow, and I didn’t really spend a lot of time getting to know what I really wanted,” she explained. “It was when I started realizing what I really wanted was when I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m going to find it here’ … I think I have to make some choices here that I have to leave. But there was a long time where I realized that I needed to make life what I wanted it to be, but the choices weren’t necessarily mine. I had to find my own choices.”
