Injuries

Lamar Odom's voice on the phone frequently was barely above a whisper. The pain clearly registered in words that flowed in stops and starts as he delivered a soliloquy about death and the effect it has had on his psyche. The Lakers forward spoke deliberately and expressed how emotional it has been for him to deal with two recent deaths. Odom attended a funeral in New York on July 13 for his 24-year-old cousin, who Odom said was murdered. The next day, Odom was a passenger in an SUV in Queens when it collided with a motorcycle.

AT MINNESOTA When: 5 PDT. Where: Target Center, Minneapolis. On the air: WNBA.com. Records: Sparks 2-0, Lynx 2-0. Record vs. Lynx (2011): 1-4. Update: Sparks guard Sharnee Zoll sustained a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee during Monday's practice and is expected to miss the remainder of the season. Zoll, who played in Europe the last four seasons before the Sparks signed her in February, averaged seven assists in the team's two exhibition games but did not play in the team's season opener Friday.

A train car loaded with lumber rolled from a side track onto a main line and hit a commuter train during rush hour, sending dozens of people to hospitals, authorities said. About 150 people were treated at the scene, and about 80 of those were sent on to hospitals, said Lt. John Hutchinson of the Canton Fire Department. None of the injuries was life-threatening, he said.

He is the well-dressed player sitting on the Clippers' bench, the sage veteran offering advice and encouragement during this playoff push for his teammates and coaching staff. But make no mistake, Chauncey Billups said, it has been killing him not to be dressed in a uniform and playing and helping the Clippers with his skills on the court. Billups hasn't played in a game since suffering a season-ending left Achilles' tendon injury Feb. 6 at Orlando. The 14-year veteran guard now says it was easier for him to not play when "I didn't travel.

The WNBA season was barely three weeks old, and already two of the league's biggest stars were out because of injuries. Sparks forward Candace Parker, the 2008 league most valuable player, had torn the meniscus in her right knee. Seattle Storm center Lauren Jackson, the reigning MVP, required surgery on her left hip. Parker won't be back for another month or so, and Jackson will be out even longer. Tough luck? No, more like the continuation of a trend. Players, coaches and trainers say injuries consistently plague the league, and they believe they know why: an off-season that really isn't one. Nearly three-quarters of the league's players also compete abroad, supplementing their relatively modest WNBA incomes with what typically are much larger payments from foreign teams that also might pick up their living expenses and shower them with gifts.

Diane Rodrigues sang, prayed and bounced on her bed during the night at Metropolitan State Hospital. A nurse assigned to keep her under constant watch sat by, occasionally dozing. By 7 a.m., the 52-year-old psychiatric patient was lying motionless on the floor, her neck broken. It took at least an hour for caregivers at the Norwalk mental hospital to glean the extent of her injuries. It took four more hours to send her to a trauma center for treatment. Rodrigues, a former kindergarten teacher, was left paralyzed after the November 2009 accident and died six months later from related respiratory complications.

Babies deprived of oxygen during birth may now be treated with a cap that cools the head to prevent or reduce brain damage, U.S. health officials said last week. Natus Medical Inc.'s Cool-Cap device may be an option for about 5,000 to 9,000 U.S. babies born each year with moderate to severe hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, the Food and Drug Administration said as it announced the product's approval.

Ever found a mysterious black-and-blue mark on your body and wondered how it gotthere? Whether the result of major trauma or an inadvertent bump, bruising is one way to assess damage to tissue. The factors involved in what makes a bruise and how it heals are fairly simple. In an effort to get to the bottom of bruising, we went to three specialists who deal in bruises: Dr. Philomena McAndrew, a Los Angeles hematologist; Dr. William Shankwiler, a Pasadena orthopedic surgeon, and Dr.

When Jay Williams slammed his motorcycle into a pole three years ago, suffering career-threatening injuries and voiding his contract with the Chicago Bulls, agent Leigh Steinberg told an interviewer that Williams wouldn't be the last high-profile athlete to put his livelihood in jeopardy while risking life and limb.

Chuck Knoblauch not only is hurting the New York Yankees with his wild throws, he's hurting their fans too. The suddenly scatter-armed second baseman made another wild throw Saturday, this one hitting a woman sitting behind the first-base dugout in a game against the Chicago White Sox. New York newspaper reports Sunday identified the woman as Marie Olbermann, mother of Fox broadcaster Keith Olbermann.

SAN ANTONIO - After Thursday night's 105-88 loss to the Spurs, Clippers players said that they understand the task ahead. Down 2-0 in their playoff series with San Antonio, they acknowledged that they need to win their next two games at home. History suggests they especially need to win Game 3 on Saturday, as no NBA team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a series. But after back-to-back 16- and 17-point losses, getting wins in Los Angeles may be easier said than done.

"It's different, I know," Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly said of his unusual lineup Tuesday night against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Right fielder Andre Ethier made his first regular-season start in center field. Scott Van Slyke, in only his fourth big league game, batted third ahead of Ethier. Jerry Sands played left field on his first day up from triple-A Albuquerque. With slugger Matt Kemp and several others on the disabled list, Mattingly had cause to be creative. But despite the shuffling, the Dodgers struggled to score against starter Wade Miley and fell to the Diamondbacks, 5-1, at Dodger Stadium.

Some of the longest-lasting relics of my kids' infancies and toddlerhoods have been their pacifiers and their sippy cups.  Even now, with the boys 3 and 5 years old, we devote two drawers in our kitchen to a collection of jumbled lids, valves and cups (many featuring slowly fading portraits of Lightning McQueen.)  The binkies, which my younger son uses at bedtime and on long airplane trips, live in a banged-up plastic container perched on a high cabinet shelf.  Someday we'll be completely done with the stuff, but I've learned the hard way that imposing strict, newspaper-ish deadlines on the kiddie set doesn't always work to my advantage - especially when milk and upholstery are involved.  New research published Monday morning in the journal Pediatrics , however, suggests that the decision to take away the bottles, binkies and sippies could also boil down to a matter of safety.  It turns out that kids get hurt using bottles, binkies and sippy cups - usually, when they sustain a fall with one of the items in their mouths.  Researchers at the Nationwide Children's Hospital and the Ohio State University in Columbus reviewed Consumer Product Safety Commission records to try to ascertain how many kids wound up in emergency rooms with injuries associated with bottle, pacifier or sippy cup use between 1991 and 2010.  In all, they estimated that number to be 45,398 children - an average of 2,270 cases per year.

Diane Rodrigues sang, prayed and bounced on her bed during the night at Metropolitan State Hospital. A nurse assigned to keep her under constant watch sat by, occasionally dozing. By 7 a.m., the 52-year-old psychiatric patient was lying motionless on the floor, her neck broken. It took at least an hour for caregivers at the Norwalk mental hospital to glean the extent of her injuries. It took four more hours to send her to a trauma center for treatment. Rodrigues, a former kindergarten teacher, was left paralyzed after the November 2009 accident and died six months later from related respiratory complications.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - They found each other on the court this time, hugging, slapping high-fives, smiling, all the Clippers amazed at what they had just accomplished. What they had done was almost unfathomable for a franchise with so little playoff history, and for a team that had been so hastily assembled this season. The Clippers on Sunday won a Game 7 for the first time in franchise history, defeating the Memphis Grizzlies, 82-72, at the FedEx Forum - prevailing in a winner-take-all game on the road, a situation in which few gave them much chance of success.

As Matt Kemp ran to first base while grounding out in the third inning Sunday against Colorado, Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly could tell something wasn't right with his center fielder. Kemp had strained his left hamstring a week earlier, and now it appeared he had aggravated the injury again. So as Kemp started to take the field in the fourth inning, Mattingly said he told the slugger, " 'Matt, if you feel anything at all, you can't go out there.'" "That's when he turned around" and back toward the bench, Mattingly said, confirming the manager's suspicion.

Dog bites that send humans to the hospital are on the upswing, according to new data. The number of people admitted to the hospital because of dog bites grew by 86% from 1993 to 2008 -- 5,100 cases in 1993 and 9,500 in 2008. An average of 866 people go to a hospital emergency room daily and an average of 26 are admitted for their injuries, based on the 2008 data, said statisticians from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The analysis found that seniors and young children (especially those ages 5 to 9)

It wasn't the best news, but it wasn't the worst news either. The Clippers announced Thursday afternoon that Blake Griffin and Chris Paul will be game-time decisions for Friday's Game 6 of the NBA first-round playoff series against the Memphis Grizzlies because of their injuries. Griffin had an MRI exam on his sprained left knee Thursday that the Clippers said revealed no structural damage. The All-Star power forward was injured during the third quarter of Game 5 Wednesday night in Memphis.

In what could have been a close-out game for the Clippers, Blake Griffin and Chris Paul spent much of the fourth quarter in an unusual position. They were on the bench. Griffin sat for nearly the first seven minutes of the fourth quarter, nursing his sprained left knee. Paul was out for the first five minutes, resting his strained right hip. They watched helplessly as Memphis erased the team's eight-point lead. Paul reentered the game with 6:37 remaining when the Clippers' advantage had fallen to one point, 76-75.

ARLINGTON, Texas -- Designated hitter Kendrys Morales, who missed a year and a half because of a broken left ankle, is experiencing soreness in his left Achilles' tendon and is not in the lineup for Friday night's game against the Texas Rangers at the Ballpark in Arlington. Morales, who played in one of the team's previous three games, said the Achilles' tendon has bothered him for three or four days. He grew so concerned about it Friday that he placed a call to Colorado to speak to Dr. Thomas Clanton, who performed the second surgery on his ankle in May 2011.