An Incident On The Fools Rush In Set Changed Everything For Matthew Perry

As Matthew Perry’s body developed a tolerance for opioids, he feigned illnesses and injuries to get more pills. The actor visited as many as eight different doctors concurrently for prescriptions. Perry also helped himself to pills in bathrooms during real estate open houses. In 1997, he sought treatment for opioid addiction at a rehab facility. By 2002, he was taking methadone for opioid withdrawal symptoms. 

Addiction to pills resulted in substantial weight loss. Perry noted that he never watched “Friends” because of the heartbreak of knowing which substances he was struggling with in a given season. Addiction to opiates also caused cumulative damage to the actor’s body and led to Perry almost dying in 2018. “I suffered from a situation that only a subset of the population gets,” Perry observed in his memoir (via E! News). “Opiates cause constipation.” It led to the actor experiencing a gastrointestinal perforation, requiring 15 surgeries, a colostomy bag, and a five-month hospital stay. When Perry was initially admitted, his survival odds were 2%.

Two years later, when Perry was a patient at a rehab facility in Switzerland, he obtained a prescription for the opioid hydrocodone. When the actor was subsequently administered propofol before a planned surgery, the interaction between drugs caused Perry’s heart to stop beating. The actor’s life was saved with continuous CPR. After five minutes, Perry’s heartbeat resumed, although the chest compressions from CPR left him with eight broken ribs.