LaVar Ball opened up about having his right leg amputated, revealing in an essay published Tuesday in SLAM that diabetes complications led doctors to remove part of his limb.
In the lengthy piece, Ball, 57, explained what happened to him that led to the surgery, saying things started around January, he went under the knife three different times and had to get four transfusions.
Ball, who has three sons, NBAers Lonzo and LaMelo, and hooper and rapper LiAngelo, got an infection on his foot that started to spread through the blood as Ball had not been “paying attention to my diabetes.”
Initially, doctors only cut off a couple of toes and then his foot before ultimately telling him that they needed to amputate again, this time almost knee-high, which had taken its toll on the eldest Ball.
“It made me think, ‘Man, just kill me and let me go about my business.’ It made me think that maybe it’s time for me to shut it down,” Ball wrote in SLAM.
But the 57-year-old credited his sons for helping push him through the dark thoughts and helping convince him to keep fighting.
“I’m the Big Baller. I’m hard to kill,” Ball wrote. “But I must admit that my boys kept me rolling. Cause a couple of times, I was like, ‘I can’t do no more blood transfusions. I can’t do no more operations. I’m just ready to shut it down. It’s enough for me.’ But I’m here for a bigger purpose.”
Ball wrote in the SLAM article that he wanted to get a message across to people that they needed to take care of their health.
“From my experience the last couple months, I want to get in people’s heads the importance of taking care of your health — especially Black people, because sometimes we’re not trying to go to the hospital, we will try to sleep it off or say, Yeah, we’ll get to it later. And sometimes it’s a little more serious than what you think,” he wrote.
Ball has seemed in good spirits in posts on social media, joking around about the situation and making the best of what has happened.