Kathie Lee Gifford is giving gratitude to all the prayers given on her behalf that she believes led to her swift recovery from a fractured pelvis this summer.
While speaking with her TODAY family on Aug. 13, the former co-host told Hoda Kotb, Craig Melvin, Al Roker and Sheinelle Jones about how she fractured her pelvis and the seemingly miraculous recovery that followed.
“I was running down the stairs in my home in Tennessee because my friend was locked out of my back door and it was 100 degrees outside,” she detailed on TODAY about how the fracture occurred in July. “I went too fast in stupid shoes and I went tumbling.”
However, only two weeks later, Gifford realized she was no longer in any pain. After calling her doctor to ask if the recovery was supposed to be worse, he encouraged her to come in for an X-ray.
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“He came in with my X-ray and goes, ‘Look at this, Kathie,” she recounted. “You’re completely healed.”
Gifford expressed her gratitude for the "hundreds of thousands of people" who had been praying for her and her recovery to be quick.
“When that happens to you, you have to give credit to all the prayers. I sob when I think about the people who have reached out to me,” she said.
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In a July 31 statement to NBC News given shortly after the fall occurred, the former co-host of TODAY with Kathie Lee & Hoda gave her thanks for the well wishes she received.
“I want to thank everybody who has reached out to me with their prayers and their lovely thoughts. Something like this reminds you of how fragile you are and how great God is,” she said in part. “I am completely aware that what I am going through is nothing compared to what so many other people are going through in this world, and I feel such empathy and compassion for the people who have chronic pain but have no options or resources. I pray for them all the time, realizing that I am unbelievably blessed: not only with all those things, but also with family and loved ones and friends who support me with their gifts and their prayers, but mostly their hearts.”
Gifford, 70, told People that she was hospitalized for over a week after she fell. She said that she'd moved 300 books by herself during signings in Nashville for her book “Herod and Mary” and “weakened her body.”
“It’s my own fault,” Gifford said.
The fall and hospitalization came as she had been recovering from a recent hip replacement surgery.
“It didn’t take much, because I was weak in that spot,” Gifford told People. “And the next thing you know, I am back in the hospital with a fractured pelvis: the front and the back. That’s more painful than anything I went through with the hip. The pelvis is unbelievably painful. but anyway, here I am.”
She said that she decided to stay in the hospital for a full week for physical therapy.
“You think you know your body and the next thing you know, your body changes when you get older,” she said. “And as much as I don’t wanna think about it, I am.”
Just after Gifford underwent her hip replacement surgery, she told Kotb in a July 17 TODAY appearance about the “agonizing pain” she was in beforehand.
“They had been looking for the problem in my spine. They finally found out what it was, and by that time, I’d been in such agonizing pain,” she recalled. “My doctor finished the surgery, came in to tell me it went beautifully, and then he said, ‘Kathie, how have you been existing all this time? (You had) some of the worst hips I’ve ever seen.’”
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