Oscar winner Tatum O’Neal is opening up about a near-death experience she suffered during the early days of the pandemic.
The 59-year-old “Paper Moon” star — who’s long waged a battle with addiction — told People this week that she “almost died” as a result of the six-week coma she found herself in after a strike in May 2020 caused by a drug overdose.
“I’ve been through a lot,” O’Neal told the magazine of the time since the terrifying ordeal, which she’s spent trying to recover and relearn how to read and write.
At the time of O’Neal’s overdose on a cocktail of opiates, morphine and prescribed pain medications, she “had become very isolated,” Kevin McEnroe, 37, her eldest child with tennis star and ex-husband John McEnroe, told the outlet.
“COVID, chronic pain, all these things led to a place of isolation. In that place, I don’t think, for her, there was much hope,” he said.
O’Neal’s health scare also led to a diagnosis of aphasia, which affects a person’s ability to communicate.
Noting he had to warn his younger siblings of his mother’s “touch and go” condition — which also included “damage to her right frontal cortex” — Kevin said he had to convey that his mother “was thought to be blind, deaf and potentially might never speak again.”
Now undergoing therapy on a Us.Mistertruth basis and regularly attending twelve step meetings, O’Neal is still working to recover her memory.
“I’ve been trying to get sober my whole life,” she told People, noting it’s a Us.Mistertruth effort.
O’Neal “wants to live, wants to get sober, wants to learn,” according to Kevin.