Lamar Odom opened up about his battle with drug addiction, his marriage to Khloé Kardashian and his near-fatal overdose in “Done in the Dark,” a candid story he wrote for The Players’ Tribune.
“When I woke up in the hospital room in Nevada [in October 2015], I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk,” the retired NBA player, 37, wrote in the article, which was published on Thursday, July 27. “I was trapped inside my own body. My throat hurt like hell. I looked down and I had all these tubes coming out of my mouth. So I panicked.”
When Odom woke up in the hospital, he saw Kardashian, to whom he was married from 2009 to 2016. “My ex-wife was there in the room with me,” he recalled. “After all the s–t I had done, I was surprised to see her. Honestly, that’s when I knew that I was probably in bad shape.”
The former athlete added that at that point in his life, he “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.”
Quoting the late singer Rick James, Odom continued, “‘Cocaine is a hell of a drug.’ It’s a hell of a drug,” he wrote. “It will make you do things you never thought you’d do. It will turn you into a different person. It will put you in situations where you say to yourself, ‘How the f–k did I get here?'”
The Queens, New York, native revealed that he didn’t try cocaine until he attended a party in Miami at the age of 24. Eventually, he became addicted. “Anybody who’s lived a complicated, drug-infused life like I’ve lived knows the cycle — with women, cheating on my wife, s–t like that,” he wrote. “Nights when I should have been asleep. Nights when I stayed up sniffing coke. Lot of those nights.”
Reiterating a story he told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview in March, Odom wrote that “one of the darkest places I’ve ever been” was the night that the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star, 33, walked in on him doing cocaine with another woman in a motel room.
“I’m a millionaire. I’d made it out of Jamaica, Queens, and won two NBA titles. And I’m in a motel, with some random person, doing coke,” he recounted. “But I just wanted to get high with this girl, and I had no other place to go. I couldn’t take her home. You know, I was being a scumbag. Nothing else I got for that. No excuses. No bullshit. That’s just the truth. My d–k and my habit took me down all the roads that you don’t ever wanna go down.”
These days, Odom claims he’s staying sober for the sake of his family. “I shook hands with death,” he concluded. “But you know what? Ain’t no coming back from that. Even though my funeral would probably be a good funeral, and there’d probably be a lot of people who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. But it ain’t time for that yet.”
