Matthew Perry says he ‘smashed his head into a cement wall’ until he was ‘covered in blood’ during rehab breakdown
MATTHEW Perry recalls smashing his head against a cement wall repeatedly as he had a breakdown during one of his rehab stints in his dark new addiction memoir.
The 53-year-old actor has opened up about his decades-long battle with drink and drugs in the shocking book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
In one particularly raw chapter, Matthew recounted a time he was admitted to a New York treatment center after five months spent in a hospital when he says his colon “exploded.”
The actor had been through his first surgery and was wearing a colostomy bag at the time.
He also said he was missing his two front teeth after they fell out while biting into a piece of peanut butter on toast.
Matthew claimed he was told to stop smoking ahead of a second surgery, along with being sent to detox from drugs – but he was struggling to cope with quitting both at the same time.
Matthew Perry
“I checked into my room, and the clock started. By day four I was going out of my mind, this has always been the hardest day,” he wrote in the memoir.
He described the rehab as being like a prison, joking they may as well have fed him through a slot in a bolted door, adding that he hated the place which wasn’t teaching him anything.
The therapists were on the floor below him when he decided to skip the elevator and make a beeline for the stairwell in a state of “total confusion.”
He remembered stopping in the stairwell with years of his life playing through his mind like a montage, from being abandoned by his father as a child, to growing up playing tennis and pining for his mother’s affection.
Most read in Uncategorized
“I’ll never be able to fully explain what happened next, but all of a sudden, I started slamming my head against the wall, as hard as humanly possible,” Matthew recalled.
“Fifteen-love. SLAM! Thirty-love. SLAM! Forty-love. SLAM! Game. Ace after ace, volley after perfect volley, my head the ball, the wall of cement the court, all the pain on the cement and on the wall, and all over my face, completing the Grand Slam, the umpire screaming, ‘GAME, SET AND MATCH, UNACCOMPANIED MINOR, SIX LOVE, NEEDS LOVE, SIX LOVE. SCARED OF LOVE.’
“There was blood everywhere,” he concluded, saying after “eight of these mind-numbing slams” someone stopped and asked him “Why are you doing that?”
Matthew said: “I gazed at her, and looking like Rocky Balboa from every one of those last scenes, I said: ‘Because I couldn’t think of anything better to do.’ Stairwells.”
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE
The popular actor has been promoting his unflinchingly honest memoir in recent weeks, as the book went on sale on Thursday, November 1.
He previously revealed he was given a two percent chance of survival after he was comatose for two weeks before surgery on his colon, but he miraculously pulled through.
The star admitted using a colostomy bag while in recovery wasn’t easy, and he woke up covered in his own feces “50 to 60” times during the hospital stay.
“‘I had s**t all over my face, all over my body, in the bed next door,” he previously told GQ, adding: “When it breaks, it breaks. You have to get nurses.”
His many health problems have been a result of his terrifying addiction problems, which worsened due to the astronomic success of Friends.
At the height of the show’s popularity, Matthew admitted he was consuming 55 Vicodin a day and weighed just 128 pounds.
He has said previously: “I was out of control and very unhealthy,” joking: “I returned to my original birth weight.”
Most read in The Sun
To promote his book, Matthew had also been interviewed by Diane Sawyer about the more painful details of his past, which saw him at one point drinking a liter of vodka a day.
After 15 rehab stays, the TV personality said he has learned to maintain his sobriety and is determined to stay on course after around 18 months clean and sober.