I was involved in a serious accident driving in torrential rain at midnight in Cardiff. I was only doing five miles an hour, but because I couldn’t see very well, I crossed a junction and collided with another car that was driving very fast. I ended up in hospital for six weeks with a shattered pelvis.
Now the Kids Classic is one of the major fund-raisers for Children’s Hospital. Since we started seven years ago, we’ve raised more than $1 million for the hospital.
Well, maybe it’s because of the rumors they had going around, you know, they had some rumors about Dennis Brown was in the hospital and all that. Well, that is all bull!
When I travel around the globe, I try as hard as I can to represent the NBA and the game of basketball to the best of my abilities. I get to go around the world and not only share the game but also my philanthropic work. Building a hospital in the Congo is one of the proudest achievements of my life.
As well as being my doctor, Mohammad Jawad is so kind and caring and we have a father/daughter relationship. When I left hospital he found out about a revolutionary rehab centre in the south of France and spent his August bank holiday taking me there in 2008 to see it – such a happy time.
Sammy Sosa grew up without a father in the back of a converted public hospital in San Pedro de Macoris, a dusty seaside town in the Dominican Republic. His father, Juan Montero, died when Sosa was 5.
I had a heart attack and it was touch and go. I was in intensive care, my body was frozen. I had an ice cap and had to get a pacemaker. I was in hospital for nearly two months.
I remember when I came home from the hospital after having my son, I wore a Narciso Rodriguez black coat. Then, I was using this fragrance that I had created. I walk by that coat, and it still smells like that fragrance. It takes you right there.
My father was and is a great father. My father always wanted to do stand-up. He wanted to be an actor. But instead he did two jobs. He did customer service at a hospital and he worked as a waiter at night. He pretty much sacrificed everything for his daughters.
If I had not played basketball and made the millions of dollars that I had made, I would never have been able to build a hospital in Congo. It started in 1997, and 10 years later I was able to unveil the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital, named after my mother, in my hometown outside of Kinshasa. It was such a blessing.
The house I grew up in had large plate-glass windows, which birds frequently crashed into headfirst. My father helped me assemble a bird hospital, consisting of a few shoe boxes, some old rags, and tiny dishes for water and food.
The goal of my University education was to get into a medical college and equip myself to run a hospital in Kumbakonam left behind by my father, M.K. Sambasivan, who died at a young age in 1936.
All parents remember the moment when they first held their children – the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket.
I remember leaving the hospital – thinking, ‘Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don’t know beans about babies! I don’t have a license to do this.’ We’re just amateurs.
We went around and looked and talked to a lot of foundations with those charities and decided upon the Children’s Hospital. They had a golf tournament at the time, but it was a small event that didn’t raise a significant amount of money.
My mother gave birth to me on the floor of our apartment in Mecca with only my toddler sister to help her because my father was at work and no male guardian was available to take her to a hospital.
Most patients enter a doctor’s office or hospital as if it were a Mayan temple, representing an ancient and mysterious culture with no language in common with the visitor.
I tried to make every bit of it as creepy as I could. And I had the same response you do. I feel the same way. The hospital scenes, that procedure was so real.
I’ll tell you what a friendship is to me. Friendship to me is, if my friends need my little finger to live, I’m going to have it cut off. I’m going to the hospital, they cut off my finger, and maybe I have a gold finger instead, and I become famous. But I still give it to my friend.
I could easily have spent one half of my life in a psychiatric hospital, and the other half in the Priory.
In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.
