PAULA ABDUL! “I COULD’VE KILLED MYSELF!”

// May 5th, 2009 // Hott News

surprisingly unfortunate

“I was freezing cold, then sweating hot, then chattering and in so much pain, it was excruciating”

There are better ways to be grateful.

After years of speculation, pop star and American Idol judge PAULA ABDUL has admitted to a prescription drug addiction spanning at least 12 years.

In a new article from “Ladies’ Home Journal”, Abdul says she spent an unspecified amount of time around last Thanksgiving in rehab at La Costa Resort and Spa, in Carlsbad, California. Abdul says she successfully kicked her addiction to a cocktail of painkillers that would sometimes make her “weird.”

“I could have killed myself. … Withdrawal — it’s the worst thing,” she said. “I was freezing cold, then sweating hot, then chattering and in so much pain, it was excruciating. But at my very core, I did not like existing the way I had been.”

Abdul insists, perhaps a little unbelievably, that she has been sober for every single taping of American Idol since it first aired in 2002, but LHJ gives her the benefit of the doubt:

By 2005 she was diagnosed with a chronic pain condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome. The illness, which can be caused by a previous injury, resulted in disabling pain, teeth-chattering, and shingles-like lesions. Paula wore a patch that delivered a pain medication about 80 times more potent than morphine and took a nerve medication to relieve her symptoms. Sometimes she took a muscle relaxer. But the pain was so bad it often left her sleepless and she would, as she says, “get weird.” It was the combination of these factors that may have led to the impression that she was high at times when she was on the air.

The article goes on to describe Paula’s search for a new home. She’s currently trying to sell her Sherman Oaks home to make a fresh start after her stalker, PAULA GOODSPEED, killed herself outside the house in November.

CHECK OUT THESE CLASSIC PAULA ABDUL MOMENTS: