Kathie Lee Gifford Reveals She Recently Had A “Serious” Surgery

Kathie Lee Gifford is opening up about the total hip replacement surgery she had last month, and the important lesson she’s learned in recovery.

The former Today co-host recently told People that she hoped the surgery would be “easy," but unfortunately that hasn't been the case. Gifford, 70, called the recuperation “one of the most painful situations of my entire life.”

"It's been really hard," she said.

Elaborating on the experience in an interview with Today this week, Gifford revealed that she lived with severe pain before doctors figured out what was ailing her.

"They had been looking for the problem in my spine," she recalled. "They finally found out what it was, and by that time, I'd been in such agonizing pain. 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.'"

Despite that, Gifford said she "jumped off that gurney after my surgery." Sitting still isn’t something the longtime television personality is used to—but she soon learned the importance of taking things slow. 

“I walked, I climbed, I walked, and my doctor said, ‘Kathie, no. You have got to realize that this is serious,’” she told People. “And I was off my walker in two days. I was off all my medications in three days, and then I did too much. I just did too much because that's who I am.” 

Gifford, who was gearing up for the release of her new historical nonfiction book, Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior, at the time, threw herself into her work.

“I started carrying books around and signing and getting ready, and my grandchildren came to visit,” she said. “And you can't. I have learned from this that you only can only do so much. You're just human. You're just human. And I'm so grateful.”

Gifford told People that an active lifestyle and decades of hard work had whittled her hips “down to nubs.” 

“You climbed mountains, you made movies, you got on stages…” she recalled her surgeon telling her. “You never took off your high heels, and you kept going and that's why you're going through what you're going through."

Even now, Gifford said she has no regrets.

“[I ask myself] would I change that? No, I was doing what God put me on this earth to do. Every year of it, I was doing what He called me to do," she told People.