Former Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson East just welcomed her third baby, a little boy, mere days before Christmas via C-section. As this was her third C-section, the busy mom of three admitted during a recent Instagram Story Q&A that it was her “hardest but smoothest” yet due to extra scar tissue and a whole lot of soreness during her recovery. Despite the extra soreness, Johnson refused to take any pain medication for an important and personal reason.
Johnson, who is also mom to 4-year-old daughter Drew and 2-year-old son Jett, opened up on her Instagram Story about her recovery after giving birth on Dec. 12. She admitted that she experienced a lot of “discomfort” after her birth experience, but was not willing to take any kind of pain medication because of her past struggles with Adderall addiction.
“Feeling great now though. I also refuse all pain meds haha (they make me SO sick and frankly after being addicted to adderall it just scares me so I don’t even mess with it,” she explained on her Instagram Story. “Long story short, during my comeback in 2010 I was prescribed adderall to ‘curb my appetite and give me more energy’ by a not good doctor.”
“Fast forward 7 years of being heavily addicted to it and having it control me, when I finally freed myself of it I swore anything even remotely addictive I’d stay away from,” she continued. “It affected every part of my life and changed who I was. I never want to feel out of control like that again.”
This isn’t the first time Johnson has referenced her former addiction issues. Back in 2020, she opened up in a YouTube video, Body Image Issues: 110 Lbs. to Pregnant, about how her struggles with body image issues eventually lead her to taking Adderall in 2010.
“I went through this dark kind of spiral of a few years on terrible medications and drugs that tried to ‘spike my metabolism’ and did nothing. I took diuretics, I did every fad diet. I remember I went through a three-week phase where I ate nothing but raw vegetables,” she said at the time. In fact, she was initially worried that her first pregnancy might trigger a backwards spiral, but found the opposite to be true. “There was something that switched when I got pregnant, where it was no longer about me or my body or the vanity or the calories or what I looked like or what I weighed,” she said in 2020. “I couldn’t have cared less. It was about protecting my baby. And I was so excited by that.”
Fortunately, Johnson has been able to move on from her earlier addiction to Adderall. While she didn’t want to take any stronger pain medication, she did say that she was able to take Tylenol or Motrin which hopefully helped alleviate some of her pain. And certainly she and her husband Andrew East were overjoyed to welcome their third child, son Barrett “Bear” Madison East, and Johnson admitted in a recent newsletter for the couple’s Family Made website that she is learning to take her time with her recovery after Bear’s birth.
“Recovery is always a process and I’ve learned to be really patient with my body,” she wrote. “Not trying to rush anything and really just going to soak it all in. The third time around feels so surreal because even though we’ve done this twice before, there’s still so much nervousness and excitement around the days leading up to the birth and then so much magic once you get to hold your sweet baby in your arms for the first time.”
It wasn’t an easy road for Johnson, especially since she felt she needed to refuse pain meds during her recovery. But now her baby Bear has arrived. And hopefully her recovery is coming along, with or without pain medication.
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