Kathie Lee Gifford is recovering after falling and suffering a fractured pelvis.
The former "TODAY" show co-host told People that she was hospitalized for over a week after she fell. She said that she’d moved “300 books by myself” during book signings in Nashville and “weakened her body.”
“It’s my own fault,” Kathie Lee, 70, said, sharing that the following day, a friend picked her up and as she hurried out the door, she “just tripped” and fractured her pelvis in two places.
TODAY.com has reached out to Kathie Lee for comment.
The fall and hospitalization comes as she has also been recovering from a recent hip replacement surgery.“It didn’t take much, because I was weak in that spot,” Kathie Lee told the magazine. “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 because she didn’t “trust myself.”
“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.”
Calling it a “humbling experience,” she added that she will have to stay indoors this summer.
“It’s summer for everybody but me,” she said. “But it’s OK. I’m going to get out to my little farm one of these days and stick my feet in my salt pool. The Lord is telling me it’s time to slow down. I’ve been running my whole life. The Lord is telling me, ‘You’ve planted a gazillion roses. Try smelling them.’”
Just two weeks prior, before revealing her pelvis fracture, Kathie Lee told Hoda Kotb in a July 17 "TODAY" show appearance about the “agonizing pain” she was in before she underwent hip replacement surgery.
“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.’”
At the time, Kathie Lee was promoting her new book, “Herod and Mary,” as well as spoke about the “joy” of spending time with her two children and three grandchildren.
“It’s so joyful to see your children marry the people they love,” she told Hoda and Jenna Bush Hager. “And then build a family of their own, and then share their families, and they let me come and visit in my own house.”
In an additional conversation with TODAY.com, Kathie Lee fawned over the way her family resembled her late husband, Frank Gifford, whom she was married to for 29 years before his death in 2015.
“They all have the Frank Gifford chin,” she said of her kids and grandkids. “It’s unbelievable. They’ve got the cleft. The DNA strain from Frank Gifford is strong. It’s very, very strong. And he was one of the most gorgeous men that God ever made. So of course my children are much more beautiful than anybody else’s. Goes without saying.”