Only weeks before celebrating her 71st birthday, Kathie Lee Gifford was recovering from total hip replacement surgery and despite orders to rest, she refused to slow down.
After the operation, the former Today co-host confesses that she may have “jumped off that gurney” and tried to accomplish “too much too soon.”
Gifford said: “I walked, I climbed. I walked, and my doctor said, ‘Kathie, no. You have got to realize that this is serious.’”
Still she didn’t listen.
The author adds, “I was off my walker in two days, and then I did too much. I just did too much that because that’s who I am.”
‘Unbelievably painful’
Gifford said the incident happened when she overextended herself while moving books for a book signing event in Nashville. Her latest book, Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior, was released July 16, 2024.
The next day, one of her friends came by to pick her up and hurrying to the door, she tripped and fractured her pelvis in two places.
“It didn’t take much, because I was weak in that spot,” Gifford said of her fall. “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.”
Calling the experience “humbling,” Gifford explains she chose to stay in hospital because she couldn’t trust herself to slow down.
“You think you know your body and the next thing you know, your body changes when you get older,” the former star of Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee tells People. “As much as I don’t wanna think about it, I am.”
‘Own worst enemy’
Meanwhile, a friend says “She aches all the time and lets everyone know it too. Pals have begged her to slow down and stop moving around, but she can’t. She’s her own worst enemy.”
A source suggests that Gifford’s busyness is because “she’s still broken hearted” and “she’s never really gotten over the breakup” with her ex, Richard Spitz.
Gifford met Spitz, a businessman, in 2019 after she left Today and moved to Nashville.
The couple were seen together a handful of times and in December 2023, a friend said “I can see Kathie Lee and Richard tying the knot in the near future.”
Another source said “She would have married and would have proposed if he didn’t.”
‘Flirty and cute’
But in a February 2024 episode of Today, Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager nominated Gifford to be the first-ever leading lady on The Golden Bachelorette.
“She would be a 10 plus, and she’d get her choice of all the men, and you know how she is all flirty and cute,” Hoda said, adding, “We’re starting to speak things into existence.”
After the episode aired, speculation about her relationship status started growing.
