The Players’ Tribune has proven to be a unique source for retirement announcements, farewells and anecdotes. But today’s entry penned by Lamar Odom may be the most real and powerful piece published on the site to date.
Just a quick refresher — the former NBA Sixth Man of the Year was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel in 2015 after suffering several strokes and kidney failure. He fell into a coma for four days.
Investigators later found Odom had ingested cocaine and other substances that night in Nevada.
Odom recounted the day he woke up from the coma and touched on several other topics in the piece:
On waking up in the hospital with tubes in his mouth
“I started trying to pull them out, but I couldn’t because my hands were so weak. The nurses came running in to stop me. You ever had a really bad dream, where you’re trying to run away from a monster or some shit, and you just can’t run? Your legs don’t work like they should, and the monster is coming right behind you, and it’s like you’re in slow motion. That’s what it felt like.”
On ex-wife Khloe Kardashian staying by his side through the ordeal
“After all the shit I had done, I was surprised to see her. Honestly, that’s when I knew that I was probably in bad shape.”
On his cocaine use leading up to that night in Nevada
“At that point in my life, I was doing coke every day. Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke. I couldn’t control it. … I didn’t want to control it.”
On cocaine in general
“With cocaine especially, there’s a high, and then an emotional low. So it’s like a roller coaster. You go high, and then you go low. High, low, high, low. After you do it, you feel shame. You think about all the reasons why you shouldn’t have done it. Then the cycle starts again.
“That’s the thing people don’t understand. Anybody who’s lived a complicated, drug-infused life like I’ve lived knows the cycle — with women, cheating on my wife, shit like that. Nights when I should have been asleep. Nights when I stayed up sniffing coke. Lot of those nights. When your heart is beating fast. When you should know better. When you’re just riding that roller coaster, man.”
On his kids’ impact on his recovery
“My daughter, Destiny, is 18. She’s beautiful and smart. And she doesn’t take any shit. When I was able to talk again, she told me straight up, ‘Dad, you need to get yourself help or I’m not going to talk to you again.'”
On sobriety
“I’m sober now. But it’s an everyday struggle. I have an addiction. I’ll always have an addiction. It never goes away. I mean, I want to get high right now. But I know that I can’t if I want to be here for my children.”
