Coming clean. Leah Messer opened up about her past problem with prescription pill abuse in a Wednesday, November 14, episode of her “Life Reboot” podcast.
While discussing her aversion to giving her children, Aliannah and Aleeah, both 8, and Adalynn, 5, anything stronger than numbing gel for pain, she admitted that she had struggled with a drug problem. “I do know how it feels to become dependent on anything given by doctors,” Messer said.
The MTV personality, 26, said that her troubles began after a botched epidural while she was giving birth to Adalynn.
“Jeremy [Calvert] had to carry me from one room to the next because I couldn’t walk,” she revealed.
“I just went in to deliver Addie and they injected me like 13 times [during the epidural],” the Teen Mom 2 alum said. “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.’”
“I spent three days in the hospital … They weren’t figuring out what the problem was, they were just keeping me on medicine. It goes into another day, four days, and I’m like, this isn’t right … this isn’t right.”
The reality star said that things did not improve once she was released from the hospital. “It still doesn’t get better at home. They put me on different drugs to go home on for like, three months, three different drugs.”
Prior to her health ordeal, Messer said she had been anti-drugs. “My dad was a drug addict,” she shared.
Messer’s ex-husband Calvert, 29, added, “It was hell … 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, who shares Adalynn with his former spouse, said that Messer’s father, who was living in the couple’s basement at the time, supplied his ailing daughter with pain meds. “He was for sure … It was easily available with him living in our basement,” he admitted.
“By then, I was already … you can’t say that I wasn’t, already, dependent on the medication,” she said, later adding, “Well, then they put me on Diazepam and it has me nodding off. I didn’t even know what that was!”
The podcast star denied having a drug addiction while filming the hit MTV series, in which ex-husband Corey Simms, with whom she shares Aliannah and Aleeah, accused her of having a “prescription pill problem.”
“Not only was I losing my kids but I was basically losing my life, my husband, everything,” Messer reflected on the podcast. “Everything was crashing down on me.”
She clarified to Us Weekly in October that despite her on-screen struggles, she did not lose custody of her children. “It’s always been 50/50. People were like, ‘Leah lost custody’ … I almost did, but I never lost custody of my children.”
Messer completed a 30-day treatment program for depression and anxiety in June 2015.
She wasn’t ready to share her story with fans, however. In November 2015, she slammed stories that claimed she had been suicidal. “Articles that are sent to me are unbelievable!” she tweeted at the time. “I am far from being suicidal because my girls need me happy and healthy! #craziness.”
Three years later, Messer came clean in an October episode of her podcast. “I wasn’t in the greatest place mentally and then it was affecting me physically, like it almost cost me my children. I became suicidal. It was a struggle.”
Now, she says she has accepted her past. “I don’t feel ashamed … I’m in a much better place now.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
