Teen Mom 2 star Leah Messer opened up about her struggles with prescription pill abuse in a new episode of her podcast Wednesday.
In the latest episode of her Life Reboot podcast, Messer explained why she avoids giving her three children — 8-year-old Aliannah and Aleeah and Adalynn, 5 — strong medication for pain, reports Us Weekly. Based on her own struggles with prescription medication, she prefers not to give them anything stronger than numbing gel.
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“I do know how it feels to become dependent on anything given by doctors,” Messer said.
Messer, 26, said her struggles started when she had an epidural while giving birth to Adalynn. Her then-husband, Jeremy Calvert, had to carry her from room to room because she was unable to walk.
“I just went in to deliver Addie and they injected me like 13 times [during the epidural],” Messer explained. “In the hospital, like, I couldn’t feel, like, my body, like, I … couldn’t get up and they just put me on morphine. A morphine pump. I kept telling Jeremy, ‘Something’s not right, something’s not right.’”
After three days in the hospital, her doctors could not figure out what was wrong, so they “were just keeping me in medicine,” Messer said. “It goes into another day, four days, and I’m like, this isn’t right … this isn’t right.”
After she left the hospital, things did not get any better. She was prescribed three different drugs in three months.
“It was hell,” Calvert, Adalynn’s father, recalled on the podcast. “At first, she couldn’t move out of bed… It was just a messed-up situation… It was just a nightmare, and she was in pain.”
Calvert also claimed Messer’s father, who was living with them at the time, was giving Messer pain medication.
“He was for sure … It was easily available with him living in our basement,” Calvert said.
“By then, I was already … you can’t say that I wasn’t, already, dependent on the medication,” Messer added. “Well, then they put me on Diazepam and it has me nodding off. I didn’t even know what that was!”
While Messer came clean about her struggles after Adalynn was born, she insisted she was not addicted to drugs while on Teen Mom 2. While on the show, Corey Smith, Messer’s ex-husband and the father of Aliannah and Aleeah, claimed she had a “prescription pill problem.”
“Not only was I losing my kids but I was basically losing my life, my husband, everything. Everything was crashing down on me,” Messer recalled.
Since starting her podcast last month, Messer has made several emotional revelations. In the first episode, she said she struggles with depression and even had suicidal thoughts. She also recently said she does not plan on getting back with Calvert romantically, even though the couple remain close. Messer dated 40-year-old Jason Jordan for six months before their split in October.
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