Matthew Perry is sharing the darkest moments of his addiction journey in order to help others who are suffering.
One of the stories is about his detox experience, which came after a five-month hospital stay after his colon exploded as a result of opioid abuse.
In his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, the Friends alum, 53, writes about being in a coma on life support with a 2% chance of survival in 2018.
He was discharged five months later, returning home with a colostomy bag, which he used for nine months.
His addiction was not miraculously healed after nearly dying.
Perry claimed he was given Oxycontin after lying to his doctor about pain from one of the 14 stomach surgeries he underwent as a result of the colon explosion.
However, what he had “conned them into giving me” was no longer working, and he needed more, he wrote.
His doctors refused, but his drug dealer agreed.
Over the next month, he attempted four times to obtain opioids from his dealer but was apprehended each time.
Perry was then sent back to rehab, this time in New York City.
Perry had lost his two front teeth after biting into toast with peanut butter on it and hadn’t fixed them when he got to rehab, in addition to the colostomy bag (which he cried over every morning when he awoke and remembered he had it).
Those were minor concerns because he had to detox from pills and quit smoking while in rehab.
Perry, a “heavy smoker,” explained that he was told to stop smoking because he was having another stomach surgery and smoking would interfere with his recovery.
He thought it was “way too much to ask” to “quit Oxycontin and smoking at the same time,” admitting he was “scared.”
He began taking Subutex, a detox drug that helps prevent withdrawal symptoms caused by stopping other opioids, and it wasn’t too bad — until day four.
By that time, “I was completely out of my mind.
This had always been the most difficult day “of detox — a process he has probably gone through 65 times in his life.
He felt trapped in rehab, which he likened to a prison, claiming that every counselor was a “guard” and that he resembled a convict “missing my two front teeth.”
On the dreaded fourth day, he stated that “something hit me” and that it felt “like something was punching me from the inside.”
To take his mind off everything, he wandered aimlessly around the room.
He described it as trying to “walk outside my body,” but he ended up in a stairwell “in a sort of panic confusion fugue state.”
There, he was reflecting on his life and struggles, writing that “the bad parts of my life were appearing to me all at once.”
“I’ll never be able to explain what happened next, but all of a sudden I started slamming my head as hard as humanly possible into the wall.”
He performed the “mind-numbing slams” eight times.
There was one “There was blood on the cement, on the wall, and all over my face…
There was blood all over.”
He claimed to resemble Rocky Balboa from his movie ending scenes.
Someone eventually heard him and intervened.
“‘What are you doing?'” he remembered being asked.
“Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” he explained.
Perry estimates he has spent $9 million on addiction treatment.
He went to rehab in Switzerland in 2019 and underwent surgery to “put some kind of weird medical device in my back” to relieve pain.
He took hydrocodone the night before his surgery and was then given the anesthesia drug propofol during surgery, which caused his heart to stop for five minutes.
It was his second near-death encounter.
Perry has been clean for 18 months.
He began writing his book on his phone notes app in the back seat of a car as he was driven to a Florida trauma therapy facility.
Perry admitted that after finishing the memoir, he didn’t read it all until the day before recording the audiobook.
He “cried and cried and cried” when he did, he told GQ.
“‘Oh, my God, this person has had the worst life imaginable!’ I exclaimed.
Then I realized, ‘This is me talking about…'”