Perfectly Flawed: The Kristy Laschober Story

Okay Nightmare Success lifters, we are back. I just talked with Christy Laschober, and man, her story is something else. Born with a medical condition that led to forty operations and a childhood spent in Children’s Hospital, Christy went from running a successful wardrobe styling business in Southern California to federal prison after selling meth to a priest who made national headlines.

Growing Up in the Hospital

Christy was born with something called VACTERL syndrome. “I had my first operation at like 10 hours old. And then I’ve had more than 40 in my lifetime,” she told me. Children’s Hospital became her second home, and massive amounts of pain medication became normal. Demerol, dilaudid, Vicodin, morphine. That was just part of life.

She learned to disconnect early. “I learned how to cope with Demerol, I guess,” she said. When friends were at the beach, she was in the hospital for three months. Her dad would promise each surgery would be the last, trying to comfort both of them. But Christy felt like she might disappoint him again.

By high school, she was functioning. Smart kid, good grades, went to the beach in the morning and skiing in the mountains at night. But the pills were always there. She’d leave the hospital with 200 Vicodin. When emotional stuff came up that she didn’t even recognize as emotional, she’d think she shouldn’t feel that way and take a couple pills to feel “normal.”

Ten Years Sober, Then Everything Fell Apart

Christy’s wake-up call came when her police officer husband’s sergeant pulled her over for driving under the influence of pills. She was embarrassed, felt bad for him, and realized she didn’t even need the pills that day. She just took them. That’s when she got sober for the first time.

She stayed clean for nearly ten years. But then her world collapsed all at once: her father got cancer and died, she discovered her husband was having an affair with someone he’d pulled over, and they were in the middle of an adoption. Instead of asking for help, she went back to the hospital for a kidney issue. “The lady’s like, ‘I’ll get you a pain shot. I’ll be right back.’ And I remember saying, ‘I know I don’t need it.’ I wasn’t in pain, but damn, I really wanted some relief,” Christy told me.

She knew it was trouble the moment the nurse left the room.

From Opioids to Meth to Federal Prison

Around the same time, someone she’d known for a while called from Palm Springs. He’d relapsed on meth and needed help. Christy thought she had a brilliant plan: “If I tried this, I will never get addicted to it. Cause I’m not that person. I’m not a drug addict like that. So if I tried this, that’ll probably cut the craving for the opioids.”

She picked him up, got him somewhere safe, then went back and tried meth herself. “And it got me,” she said simply. The progression was fast. Someone suggested they could buy a little more and sell it to make money since she wasn’t working her styling business anymore. Then someone mentioned a guy in Connecticut who wanted drugs.

“I’m an entrepreneur at heart. And so when someone says, ‘Hey, you know, you can buy this much and sell this much,’ and you’re not working, you do it. And it feels like a transaction,” she explained. The guy in Connecticut turned out to be a priest. The media dubbed him “Monsignor Meth” when the story broke.

The nightmare came down in Las Vegas. “I was like, ‘How these maids are making so much noise,’ but it wasn’t the maids,” Christy said about the morning federal agents knocked down their hotel room door. They were yelling about guns, which neither she nor her boyfriend had ever owned.

Five Prisons and Maximum Security

As a first-time offender, Christy got 60 months in federal prison. But here’s the thing about federal sentencing: what the judge recommends is just a suggestion. The Bureau of Prisons does whatever it wants. She thought she was going to a camp in California. Instead, she ended up in maximum security in Texas.

She moved through five different facilities. Two years in Rhode Island with no outside time, just a cinder block room with tiny windows near the ceiling. Twenty women in limbo, some facing two years to life, playing spades and trying to stay normal while walking circles indoors.

Then Texas. A medical center that was also maximum security. “You know, imagine a mother who’s spent so much time with me in the hospital and I’m going to hospital of horse without her, you know, in prison, a maximum security prison,” she told me.

The drug program there was brutal. Christy wanted to do the work but got kicked out right before release for “no clinical progress” and “inauthenticity.” The program director told her something unforgivable: “Thank God you couldn’t have children, Christy. You would have been a terrible mother.” That cost Christy another year.

Her landscape supervisor, who barely spoke to avoid trouble with the women, gave her the one piece of hope she needed: “I don’t think they made anyone like you before here. Do your work, run around the track, put your head down and get out.”

Starting Over with Nothing

Christy got out in 2017 and relocated to Oregon to be near family and away from her ex-boyfriend, who had relapsed. She’d lost everything. “I was a wardrobe stylist who had to get a pair of jeans from a homeless girl in the halfway house,” she said.

But having nothing was also freedom. She went back to school, graduated with honors from Southern Oregon University, and became a fierce advocate for prison reform. She’s working to remove criminal history boxes from college applications and create opportunities for formerly incarcerated people to get education.

Today she runs the Freedom Exchange Project and wrote a book called “Perfectly Flawed: Uncovering Your Greatest Purpose.” When I talked to her, she was in New Orleans, comparing it to an adult Disneyland after growing up across from the real Disneyland in Anaheim.

Christy’s story shows how fast things can spiral and how addiction doesn’t care about your background, education, or business success. But it also shows that rock bottom really can be the foundation for something new. She lost everything and built something better.