Stephen Fry was given the controversial painkiller OxyContin to help him to move again during his recovery from a serious fall.
Now walking without a stick for the first time since the accident in September, Fry has revealed he was a reluctant user of the drug. He took it on the advice of his surgeon, after being warned that if he waited until the pain subsided his leg muscles would weaken.
Talking for the first time about his injury and treatment, Fry, 66, said the surgeon advised him he would be recovering for “months and months” without the strong painkillers, telling him: “For six or seven weeks you’ll lie without being able to move and what will happen to your muscles … they’ll be atrophied.”
Fry was first offered the pills by a nurse when he arrived at hospital in Woolwich, south London, and was told they were OxyContin. “I said, ‘What? That’s the highly addictive opioid drug that is basically behind the opioid crisis.’ So I said, ‘No, I don’t think I should have that.’”
The next morning his surgeon took him to task. “I said, ‘It was very kind of you, but I’ll put up with a bit more pain.’ But he said, ‘You misunderstand. I didn’t prescribe it for your sake at all. I prescribed it for the sake of the NHS.’”
The performer and author had been rushed to hospital after falling off a stage at the end of a talk he gave at the O2 arena. “I did my bow after delivering this lecture, turned to go off stage and didn’t realise that I was walking off a part of the stage where there was nothing,” he explained this weekend to the BBC Radio 2 presenter Claudia Winkleman.
“Six-foot drop on to concrete. So I broke my right leg in a couple of places and my hip and my pelvis in four places and a bunch of ribs.”
Fry told Winkleman he is now feeling fine and is walking unaided: “Like Lazarus, I have cast aside my crutches and stick.”
He also thanked the NHS on the radio show, adding that the health service is “extraordinary”. Sharing his experience of the Queen Elizabeth hospital, he said: “[It’s] not a famous hospital, but doing extraordinary work every day. They were brilliant to me. They are under a huge amount of pressure, but they delivered everything I could have possibly wanted.”