Celebrity News

What you might not know about Lamar Odom

No matter what you think of the Kardashians, there is a man fighting for his life.

Lamar Odom is in hospital and fighting for his life after he was found unresponsive at a Nevada brothel on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

The 35-year-old former Los Angeles Lakers basketball player and ex-husband of reality TV star Khloe Kardashian, suffered a “medical emergency” after allegedly using cocaine and taking as many as 10 herbal sexual enhancement tablets.

Khloe Kardashian – along with her sister Kim Kardashian West and mother Kris Jenner – flew to Las Vegas to be by Lamar’s side. Despite both signing divorce papers in July, Khloe and Lamar are still legally married, and Khloe is in charge of making decisions about his medical care, People reports.

No matter your thoughts on the Kardashians, there is a man – famous in his own right as a professional athlete, one who twice won the NBA championships – that is in a critical condition after an alleged drug overdose.

Whether he will pull through remains unclear, but what, unfortunately, is very clear, is that this downfall has been a long time coming. Lamar’s path has not been an easy one.

His mother died of cancer when he was 12; his father was a heroin addict; and he lost a six-month-old son to sudden infant death syndrome in 2006. In 2011, a day after attending his 24-year-old cousin’s funeral, he was a passenger in a car accident that killed a 15-year-old pedestrian, a death which took its toll.

In recent years he’s gone through a very public breakup and breakdown, as he struggled with a drug addiction that has all but ended his career, and perhaps, his life.

Reports and rumours both will continue to circulate for days to come, and as Piers Morgan demonstrated yesterday, people’s disdain for anything Kardashian-related will lead them to opine this tragedy is the reality TV families fault.

All we know for sure is there is a man lying in hospital fighting for his life. We wish him all the best.

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