Fierce (25 page)

‘Our main concern …’ the doctor started as he eased me gently into a chair. When he saw the shock on my face he started again: ‘We are concerned about the blood supply to his left arm as a result of a punctured main artery. We have seventy-two hours to get the blood back or we’ll have to amputate.’

The whole time I was repeating back to him, ‘Please just do whatever you have to do to save my dad. Please save my dad.’ The doctor then lowered his voice and added, ‘Be prepared that this may be the last time that you might be able to speak to your daddy because your daddy might not make it.’

I walked in and my dad was talking to the nurses. He was on so much medication he seemed OK and he kept pressing the morphine button so it would go into his system quicker – bloody typical of him. He was pointing at me and then the nurses saying, ‘Don’t let them fuck up my tattoos, Kel.’

I don’t know what he thought they were going to do. But as I stood there holding his hand by the bedside, all of a sudden he started to make these gargling noises and then these brown bubbles started to come out of his mouth. There was a deafening flat-line noise coming from the machine he was attached to. The medical team raced to him and started working on him and I was practically carried out backwards by two doctors, kicking my legs and screaming because I didn’t want to leave him.

After they’d managed to stabilise him, I called Mum and told her that Dad had gone into surgery to repair his arm, but by then Uncle Tony had told her the extent of Dad’s injuries and she was preparing to fly to London on her own. While she was taking the eleven-hour flight to the UK, the doctors battled to save Dad’s arm by taking a vein from his right arm and putting it in his left to replace the damaged artery.

I spent the night at the hospital with Uncle Tony pacing up and down and hoping my dad would be OK. Photographers started to
arrive outside and soon there was a whole bunch of them huddled together on the freezing December evening. When my mum arrived the next day she was bundled through the pack and into the hospital. Dad was on a respirator, unable to breathe on his own, and there was every tube imaginable coming out from all over his body. By this point, the newspapers had got wind of the story and the
Daily Mirror
front page said: ‘Ozzy in quad bike horror.’

Uncle Tony explained to me that the bike had landed on Dad after he’d fallen off, when he had ridden into a pot-hole hidden by leaves. The security man who was with him at the time had actually had to revive my father twice. We were all so worried.

My mum was now in remission from cancer, and in the autumn of 2003 had started filming her chat show,
The Sharon Osbourne Show
, in the States. She had to abandon filming so she could be with my dad. After two days – we were waiting for the dreaded seventy-two hours to pass, when we’d find out whether my father had lost his arm or not – I flew back to America to cover for her. I didn’t want to leave Dad, but I agreed to go only for a couple of days before flying back to the UK to be with him again.

During that time, Mum kept me up to date on his condition and we were so pleased when the doctors told us the vein had taken and the arm wouldn’t need to be amputated. But that wasn’t the end; Dad was unable to breathe on his own and was still on a respirator. As I flew back to Los Angeles, Jack and Aimee, unable to bear being so far away, were travelling to the UK to be with him. Recording Mum’s show wasn’t a problem – it was in a studio on Sunset and not far from
Doheny. But I desperately wanted to get back. Throughout this whole period I was still popping my Vicodin pills. I had a permanent stash on me.

When I returned to the hospital, Mum, Jack and Aimee had pretty much been covering the visits in shifts. Welders was a twenty-minute drive away and Uncle Tony had been ferrying them backwards and forwards. My father’s sisters came to visit with my half-brother and -sister, Louis and Jessica, who flew in from Ireland. Colin Newman came and so did Dad’s writing partner, Mark Hudson.

Mum would catnap beside him and me, Jack, Aimee, Uncle Tony and Big Dave all took it in turns to sit and talk to him. On the eighth day after the operation, they finally took him off the ventilator. His breathing wasn’t great, but he was conscious. During those eight days our single had gone to number one in the UK charts and I’d been absolutely desperate for him to wake up so I could tell him. His breathing started to get better but he still couldn’t speak properly. On the tenth day after the accident, I stood by his bed and said, ‘Dad, our single is number one.’ He responded by holding up one of his fingers as a sign that he’d understood. The tears poured down my cheeks. He was obviously so pleased for us and wanted to let me know, but it was the only thing he could do.

I said, ‘I love you, Dadda.’

Dad’s accident and the daily trips to the hospital had left us all so exhausted that Mum planned a little overnight trip to London to give us a break before we spent Christmas in the hospital with Dad. My mum liked to make Christmas special for us all and it was a really
nice break while the nurses took care of my dad in hospital. But when we got back the next morning we had a shock. Dad was sitting on the edge of the bed with a collar around his neck and tears in his eyes saying, ‘Sharon, I want to come out.’

The nurses had said March, and we all wanted him to stay in the hospital because he wasn’t ready to leave. Me, Jack and Aimee were all in tears as we huddled around Dad trying to persuade him to stay and get the care he needed. I was pleading, ‘Dad, you have to stay in. Please.’ But he asked the hospital staff for the papers that he needed to sign himself out, and there was nothing any one of us could do. We’d have to cope.

Me and Mum slept with him in the spare room throughout Christmas, Mum lying in the cramped single bed next to Dad and me on the floor in case he rolled out. It was crazy, but it was what my dad wanted. Of course he was being difficult and insisting on doing more than he should have been, like hobbling around with a stick and not resting, so in the end Mum packed the rest of us back to LA. She stayed to look after him.

I flew back on my own and during the flight – despite being out of it on Vicodin – I decided I didn’t want to take the tablets any more. I’d been worried sick about my father after the accident, I hated the horrible feeling of coming down from the pills during every flight and I wanted to be in control of my life.

When I got back to LA I vowed that that was it. But I still had a big stash at the house, so instead of throwing them away, I decided not to buy any more when they ran out. It wasn’t until the end of February that that happened, which gives you an idea of how many pills I had. True to my
word, I prepared to come off them on my own. This was a stupid idea.

Vicodin is an opiate and is stored in your muscles, so as soon as I tried to stop taking them it made my body ache as the drugs gradually began to leave my system. I felt very sick and the longer I went without taking another pill the harder it got. I was scrunched up in a ball on my bed in Doheny, shivering like crazy, with goose bumps all over my body. I couldn’t bear it. That feeling would have lasted two weeks. But after two days I gave up.

Because I’d wanted to stop taking them, my usual stash had run dry so, in a panic, I called the guy who had given me my first tablet more than two and a half years earlier. He agreed to meet me straight away, and I got in my car and drove the five minutes to Sunset where we’d arranged to meet outside a store.

Mum and Dad had now flown back to LA so she could finish filming
The Sharon Osbourne Show
. My dad was improving and Mum was in talks to be a judge on a new ITV show called
The X Factor
. We were also preparing to start the merry-go-round of press for the third series of
The Osbournes
.

On the Friday after I had bought my pills on Sunset I was sitting in my bedroom when my mum stormed in and chucked a whole bunch of photographs at me. They scattered on the bed and I looked
down and saw images of me handing over money to my dealer and taking something from him. I’d been caught buying drugs. My mum was pacing the room shouting, ‘You’re a fucking liar, Kelly. You’ve been fucking lying to us and we’re sick of your bullshit.’

I sat there with my mouth closed not saying a word. What could I say? My heart was pounding, but at the same time I felt a sense of relief. I knew I needed help.

My mum was on a mission. She made me tell her who’d been giving the pills to me and got him on the phone. She bollocked him like I’ve never heard her bollock anyone before. I didn’t even fight back. I just listened and looked at her. I thought, ‘Kelly Osbourne, you’ve been busted.’

It turned out that earlier that day, the
News of the World
had sent the pictures of me scoring drugs to our family publicist and they had contacted my mum. Now she had the proof – one hundred per cent proof – and there was nothing I could do but go into rehab.

I am in no position to tell someone whether to take drugs or not take drugs, but I can tell you the reality.

The reality is this: every day is a struggle when you’re an addict. In
the back of your mind you’re always thinking, OK if something shitty happens, am I going to turn to the drugs again? That is a huge burden for anyone. I suffer terrible anxiety since I’ve given up drugs. I can sit in a room and feel like the walls are closing in on me. That feeling will probably stay with me for ever.

I owe the photographer who exposed me in the newspaper a massive thank you! He changed my life. The day I was actually forced to think about what I was doing to myself, my family and my friends (and those photographs made me do that), changed me for ever. Because even when you go back to drugs, the first time you’re made to face the fact that what you’re doing is seriously damaging you, that feeling never, never, never goes away.

O
N
the day I was checking into rehab, my parents decided to go on
Larry King Live
. It’s a hugely popular talk show on the TV channel CNN. They had decided that they wanted to pre-empt the
News of the World
story and announce to the world that I was checking into rehab. I hated them for doing that. I really did. I think they did it because they felt massively guilty that another one of their children was going into rehab. They also wanted people to know the true story. I was really angry with them. I wanted just a bit of time to clear my head before the
News of the World
printed the story. But Mum and Dad going on that show stopped that. While they headed off to the studio, Jack, Melinda and Big Dave stayed with me at home – probably to make sure I wouldn’t try and run away.