SearchMENU Skip to content Done in the Dark JUL 27 2017 PHOTO BY THE PLAYERS' TRIBUNE Lamar Odom, Retired / NBA - The Players' Tribune LAMAR ODOM RETIRED / NBA When I woke up in the hospital room in Nevada, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. 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.

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.

I was laying there, looking up at the ceiling, and the doctors kept coming in and standing over me and saying some stuff. Then they’d leave. Then they’d come back. Leave, come back. Leave again, come back again. Or maybe I was just going in and out of sleep.

My ex-wife was there in the room with me. 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.

At some point, the main doctor came in and told me what had happened. He said, “Mr. Odom, you’ve been in a coma for the last four days. Do you understand?”

I couldn’t talk. So I just nodded.

He said, “It’s a miracle that you’re here. We didn’t think you were going to make it.”

I was in total shock. Couldn’t say any clever shit back. Couldn’t ask questions. It was the first time in my life that I felt helpless. I felt like I was two inches tall. It was just … it was real.

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.

I remember sitting there in bed, and for the first time in my life I couldn’t talk my way out of the situation. I was trapped all day in my own thoughts. And I kept thinking about something that my grandmother used to say to me when I was a kid.

I could see her face, like she was right there in the room.

“What’s done in the dark,” she would say, “will come out in the light.”

I think of all the sneaky shit I tried to get away with. All the times I did wrong. All the stuff I tried to hide. If it’s not in the public light, it’s in God’s light.

I was laying there in that bed, hooked up to all these machines, people all around me crying, and there was no running from it anymore. It was like God was telling me, “Whatever the fuck you think you’re doing, you need to slow down. Or it’s gonna be worse than this.”

Only one thing worse than this.

PHOTO BY NATHANIEL S. BUTLER/NBAE/GETTY IMAGES

Rick James said it best.

“Cocaine is a hell of a drug.”

It’s a hell of a drug.

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 fuck did I get here?”

When I was in that hospital bed, I kept asking myself that question. And I kept thinking about all the people in my life who aren’t here anymore. Mostly, I thought about my mother. My dad wasn’t really around when I was a kid. He had his own problems with addiction. But my mother was my best friend in the world. She was just so caring. My first memory in life is hearing the sound of her voice. She had these really wide eyes and a real soft voice.

If we were at a family party everybody would ask me, “Lamar, where’s your mother? Where’s Cathy? Where’s Cathy?”

She was like the center of the universe in Jamaica, Queens.