Kathie Lee Gifford did not want to continue living with intense pain, but compassion and prayer got her through it.
“The last two years — because of the pain and the disappointment in my personal life, a huge disappointment — I have wanted to go home to Jesus,” she explained recently.
In July 2024, the former TV personality had a pelvic fracture, a damaged hip and a spine misdiagnosis that left her unable to walk.
The fracture happened when she moved 300 books by herself for book signings.
“It didn’t take much, because I was weak in that spot,” Gifford said in 2024. “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 had a hip replacement surgery, and the recovery was very hard.
“I was in a black place and in a black space for two years. And I just kept crying out to Him, “Lord, if this is it, if this is all you have for me, I’m okay; take me home,’” Gifford said.
Despite the recent births of her five grandchildren, whom she adores, she still felt like she wanted to leave.
“I couldn’t carry them, I couldn’t love on them, I couldn’t run and play with them,” she said. “All I could do was sit there and sing and write silly songs with them.”
At times her pain was so intense that she had to crawl across the floor in her home.
“I thought I had the best doctors in the world,” Gifford said on Sean Hannity’s podcast. “And they kept saying to me, ‘It’s not your hip, it is your spine.'”
When she realized her spine was misdiagnosed, she called the doctor and threatened to sue.
“I don’t want anybody else to ever have to suffer like that,” she said.
Gifford said when people are in the kind of pain she was in, they lash out at God or they see everyone else who’s suffered more than they have.
“It gives you a compassion for them that you thought you had, but you don’t understand until, you know, it’s you. If I wasn’t crying out to the Lord to give me something to have purpose for again or something to have joy in my life again, I was praying for all these other people,” she explained.
This compassion is what actually led Gifford out of her suffering, and she’ll always be grateful for it.
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