THE Bachelorette star Zac Clark revealed he underwent unnecessary surgery in order to get painkillers at the height of his addiction.
Zac, who proposed to Tayshia Adams at the end of the recent season, was open about his former addiction on the show and with the 30-year-old.
Now, the 37-year-old told Elizabeth Vargas, host of the Heart of the Matter podcast, the lengths he truly took to get painkillers after he began experimenting following a brain tumor.
He shared: “I’ll never forget, I went to an Eagles game on a Sunday and overdid it, which basically means I did all my drugs.
“So, I woke up Monday morning with nothing left and I was sick. I had this crazy thought – I didn’t know what my plan was – and then I think dehydration or something kicked in and I felt my side. I was like, ‘I think I can figure something out here.’ I think I googled whatever symptoms I had to google.”
Zac revealed how he then visited the local doctor who turned out to be from his hometown, and he decided to “schmooze” him and “sure enough, he was giving me Dilaudid within a half hour and I ended up going through with the surgery.”
Asking for clarification, Elizabeth said: “You had your gallbladder removed just so you can get pain pills?”
“That is correct,” Zac continued.
“Right before [they put me under], the doctor looked at me in the eye and he goes: ‘You know what we’re doing today, right?’
“I said: ‘Yeah, you’re taking my gallbladder out.’ He said, ‘Before I put you under, I just want to make sure you want to go through with this.’ And I was like, ‘Yep.’ And I did it. It was nuts.”
He has been sober since 2011.
On the show, Zac was vying for Tayshia’s heart and made it to the final ceremony being given her final rose and dropping to one knee.
He shared his history in 2014 at a conference, sharing that he was a “degenerate” alcoholic and drug addict who was hooked on painkillers as early as high school.
“Don’t let this suit fool you,” he said to the audience in 2014, “I am a degenerate alcoholic and drug addict.”
He went on to reveal he initially struggled with Oxycontin, morphine and nitrous oxide that eventuated into crack and heroin.
Playing three sports in high school, he hid his drug abuse behind his athletic “front.”
Zac was arrested for possession of drugs and driving under the influence in his early 20s.
In 2017, he founded a a recovery program called Release Recovery that focused on helping reintegrate people back into the world after rehab, which, according to his ABC bio, “has become his life’s purpose.”
