Los Angeles, Sep 10 (IANS): Rapper Eminem says it "took a long time" for his "brain to start working again" after he was almost killed by his infamous drug overdose in 2007.

The 49-year-old rapper was fighting a prescription medication addiction when he was hospitalised in December 2007 after overdosing on methadone before going to rehab, and rarely publicly talks of the effects of the incident, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

In an intimate interview on the 'Paul Pod podcast', hosted by the Grammy award winner's long-term manager Paul Rosenberg, 51, Eminem said: "It took a long time for my brain to start working again."

The rapper added he was taking "75 to 80 Valium a night" while he was detoxing and working on his album 'Relapse'.

He said about a track called 'Detroit Basketball' being leaked at the time

"It was f****** weird, because as my brain was turning back on, I started going over lines like, 'Wait, that's not good'. If you remember, I don't know which version leaked, but if you remember, there were like, 20 versions of that s***."

Eminem also asked Rosenberg: "Didn't you ask the doctors when I first started rapping again, didn't you say, 'I just wanna make sure he doesn't have brain damage'?"

Rosenberg responded: "Yeah. I thought you might have some permanent problems. Yeah, I was concerned, for sure."

Eminem added about getting back to recording while he fought to stay clean: "'Encore' (the album before his overdose) was mediocre, and with 'Relapse' it was the best I could do at that point in time.

"I was so scatter-brained that the people around me thought that I might have given myself brain damage. I was in this weird fog for months. Like, literally I wasn't making sense it had been so long since I'd done vocals without a ton of Valium and Vicodin. I almost had to relearn how to rap."