Jinger Duggar doesn’t like taking medication unless she absolutely has to.
After she gave birth to her first child, daughter Felicity, in 2018, Duggar, 30, made an exception and took what she thought was something like ibuprofen so she could endure the 2.5-hour ride home from the hospital.
It was not ibuprofen.
Duggar doesn’t know what it was, but she described it as feeling like hard drugs when she recounted the story on “The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast.”
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“I wasn’t thinking it was going to be anything more than [ibuprofen]. They gave me some serious, like hard — I was gonna say hard drugs,” she said on the episode released Wednesday, November 20.
Doctors gave her the medicine about 10 minutes before the couple left the hospital in San Antonio, headed back toward their home in Laredo, Texas.
“They gave me something and I don’t remember what it was, but it made me so nauseous,” she said. “I felt like I was going to vomit. The second I got in the car.”
With the Counting On crew by her side for the trip home, Duggar needed to ask them to turn off the GoPro cameras they were using to document the ride.
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“I sat in the car with the AC blasting and I was just so sick and I felt shaky,” she said. “I felt horrible. And to this day I don’t know what that medicine was they gave me, but I will never let them do that again.”
Duggar’s sickness lasted the entire ride back to Laredo, putting the arrival home with the new baby into jeopardy for the crew.
“They had to give me a little bit of time and then they took another lap around the block once I was feeling a little bit better,” she remembered. “[They turned] the GoPros on to make it look like I was pulling up into the house even though I’d been there for a bit.”
For her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, the trip was just as harrowing, albeit for a different reason. With Duggar out of commission, he was left to deal with the stress of driving a newborn baby home for the first time.
“I was tense too. I was like two hands on the wheel, you’ve got his fragile little baby, who even in the car seat looks like a peanut,” he said. “And so I was just looking at all these reckless drivers … I’d never been more conscious in my life. I was more conscious of the rules and regulations of driving than when I was taking my driver’s test.”
Thankfully for both, Duggar said she learned her lesson. When she had daughter Evangeline in 2020, she said that after the epidural, she told the doctors only to give her ibuprofen.