TV personality and author Kathie Lee Gifford opened up to ET about her recent hospitalization and her recovery.
On the mend and getting better by the day! Kathie Lee Gifford is home and doing well after spending a week in the hospital for a fractured pelvis.
The TV personality, 70, spoke with ET”s Rachel Smith on Wednesday, and she opened up about how she”s feeling after being released from the hospital, where she found herself after fracturing her pelvis in two places amid her recovery from hip replacement surgery.
“I”m doing well!” Gifford shared. “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.”
According to Gifford, after she started feeling better from her recent hip replacement surgery, she began doing book signings and traveling, which caused her to overexert herself and weaken her body.
“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,” Gifford shared. “Our bones, things like that, don”t heal for sometimes months — even though you feel so much better.”
According to Gifford, she “had a big signing” event coming up, promoting her new book, Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior, and she “moved 300 books in about a day in a half here at my home.”
“I knew that night, when I went to sleep, I said, ”Kathie, you did too much today. You”re hurting again where you haven”t been hurting.” I said, ”I”ll sleep it off.” And so the next day, I did the signing [and] it went really, really well,” Gifford recalled. To celebrate how well it went, she made plans with a friend to go out the next afternoon and enjoy a girls day out.
The next day, when her friend came over, she called Gifford and said she was locked out of her house. In her excitement to open the door for her friend, things went south quickly.
“On the way down [the stairs] and in my eagerness to get to my friend and get her out of the heat… I missed a step and I went tumbling,” Gifford explained. “It”s my own fault. I should not have been in a hurry, you know? What am I in a hurry for?”
Gifford spent around a full week in the hospital after the fracture, and now that she”s back home, she”s doing physical therapy every day.
“They gotta get you up and moving. You don”t want your bones to atrophy,” she said. “It can be anywhere from three months to, you know, just a month to who knows? I just have to listen to them this time.”
Earlier this month — before the pelvis injury — Gifford appeared on the Today show, returning to studio 1A to sit down with Hoda Kotb, 59. Gifford shared that she was on the road to recovery after her hip replacement while promoting her new novel.
Prior to her procedure, Gifford was in “agonizing pain” and had “one of the worst hips” her doctor had ever seen. Gifford said she had her hip replacement surgery about a month ago.
“I had been in such agonizing pain,” Gifford said, noting that her physical discomfort “was terrible” before surgery.
“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?”” Gifford recalled. “He said, ”It”s one of the worst hips I”ve ever seen.””
Gifford”s active lifestyle may be partially to blame for her hip deterioration.
“You”re always on the go,” Kotb told Gifford. The two co-hosted Today together for 11 years before Gifford retired and relocated to Nashville in 2019. “I never once saw you stop, even if you were in the car. I remember, you”d be writing notes. You”re always- your brain, your body is always working.”
Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior is out now.
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