Kathie Lee Gifford says it’s a “miracle” that her recovery after fracturing her pelvis has gone so well.
On Tuesday, the former TV anchor, 70, made an appearance on Today virtually to give her fans and her former coworkers an update on her progress. At the end of July, Gifford shocked fans as she revealed her ailment, which came on the heels of a hip replacement.
According to the beloved newscaster, she believed herself to be further along in her healing journey after the hip replacement surgery and was rushing down a flight of stairs when she fell and cracked her pelvis in “the front and the back.”
“I just went too fast in stupid shoes and I went tumbling,” Gifford told Al Roker and the rest of the Today gang, adding that the incident happened at her brownstone in Tennessee.
Despite the seriousness of the injury, Gifford told her former Today co-hosts that just two weeks after the fall, she was experiencing little to no pain. After a trip back to the doctor for another x-ray, her team discovered that the fractures had almost completely healed.
“You know, he doesn’t see that very often. He said, ‘You are healed, it is a miracle,'” Gifford explained, adding that her doctor joked, “‘And now you can have one glass of wine if you want.'”
As for her surprise hip replacement, Gifford similarly returned to studio 1A for a sit down with Hoda Kotb, 60, in which she described the pain she was experiencing before opting to go under the knife and repair “one of the worst hips” her doctor had ever seen.
“I had been in such agonizing pain,” Gifford said in mid-July, noting that her physical discomfort “was terrible” before surgery.
She added, “My doctor finished the surgery, came in to tell me it went beautifully and then said, ‘Kathie, how have you been existing all this time?'”
After her weeklong hospital stint in July for her fractured pelvis, Gifford chatted with ET and provided an update on both her pelvic injury and her hip replacement recovery. She shared that she was in good spirits and looking forward to finally returning to a sense of normalcy.
“I’m doing well!” the Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior author explained at the time. “I’m happy to be out of the hospital. As lovely as all those people are to me, they really took good care of me, but there’s no place like home.”
“This is what happens most of the time — you think you’re better, because you are so much better, and then you feel like you’re back to absolute normal, and you’re not,” she shared. “Our bones, things like that, don’t heal for sometimes months — even though you feel so much better.”
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