Khloé Kardashian gives update on Lamar Odom's health

Reality TV star Khloé Kardashian says her estranged husband, Lamar Odom, has been progressing medically since his coma and stroke, but a challenging recovery remains ahead.

"He is off of all machines that help his organs, but still he has such a long way to go," Kardashian, 31, says on the pretaped episode of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" airing Monday. "He's learning how to walk again and feed himself again and put sentences together. Cognitively . . . it's a long, long road ahead."

Former NBA player Odom, 36, has been recuperating at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center since falling unconscious Oct. 13 at a legal Nevada brothel, where authorities said he had used cocaine and sexual-performance enhancers. He was comatose for three days in a Las Vegas hospital before awakening and being transferred to Los Angeles.

"I can't tell him" what caused his hospitalization, Kardashian tells DeGeneres. "We tell him he had a brain injury. I can't tell him how that brain injury was caused, because it will set him back."

Odom, she added, "never asks why he's here. He's never asked. . . . He's really confused a lot. . . . Every day is different. Sometimes he knows who the president is or his birthday, and then other times he thinks he's 26 -- and I said, 'I bet you wish you were 26; so do I!' "

"The stroke," Kardashian says in the episode, "affected a part of his, like, emotion side . . . among other parts of the brain. But he's able to smile and laugh at appropriate times, which was awesome. . . . "

Ultimately, she avows: "I love him and I always will, and he's a fantastic person who deserves support and love and for someone to be by his side, and for me, I am that to him. And thank God I have a fantastic family who loves me and loves him just as much. And they're so supportive and they're with me and I have a great boyfriend [Houston Rockets guard James Harden, 26] who's understanding."

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