Al was hospitalized in November 2022 for blood clots and he later returned to the hospital, finally going home on Dec. 8.
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CREDIT: NBC NEWS / TODAY
By: Maura Hohmann
After two months away from his TODAY family due to health issues, Al Roker returned to the broadcast on Jan. 6 and shared new details about his condition and recovery alongside his wife, ABC News correspondent Deborah Roberts.
Al revealed that he had “two complicating things” he was dealing with — blood clots that developed after he had COVID-19 in September, as well as internal bleeding.
“I lost half my blood. They were trying to figure out where it was,” he said of his medical team at the New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Al ended up needing surgery, and his medical team discovered he had two bleeding ulcers, he said. They had to resection his colon, take out his gallbladder and redo his duodenum, part of the small intestine.
“I went into for one operation, I got four free,” Al joked.
The beloved TODAY weatherman was first hospitalized in November 2022 and shared on Instagram at the time that he had blood clots in his legs that had moved into his lungs. He was there for a month and unable to co-host the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the first time in 27 years. He went home on Thanksgiving but had to return to the hospital, finally going home on Dec. 8.
It was the first time that Al had been in an intensive care unit — in particular the surgical ICU, he said.
“(We) were extraordinarily concerned about Al,” Dr. Felice H. Schnoll-Sussman, Al’s gastroenterologist, told TODAY in a Jan. 6 segment. “Extraordinarily concerned. He had a life-threatening experience. I mean, there’s just no doubt about that.”
Al’s wife, Deborah, shared how scary his condition was for his family. He has three children: Courtney, 35, Leila, 24, and Nick, 20.
“He is a living, breathing miracle,” she said on TODAY. “He really is, and I have to say — I’m not overstating it, I don’t think — Al was a very, very sick man. And I think most people did not know that.”
“He was a medical mystery for weeks,” Deborah recalled. “It was the most tumultuous, frightening journey we have ever been on.”
She added that the surgery he went through was “major,” and he also needed many scopes and tests.
“We were just on pins and needles every day,” she said.
But there was one moment in particular where Deborah knew that Al would pull through.
“I was sitting in the hospital and through this very scratchy voice — and he was so gaunt and exhausted — he said, ‘I’m going to make a spatchcock turkey,'” Deborah said. “I didn’t know whether to burst into tears or just to beam. That was the moment. … I just knew at that point that (Al’s) will, that drive is so, so strong.”
Al’s recovery was made easier by his participation in the Start TODAY walking group, he said. Earlier this year, he hit a major exercise milestone: walking more than 10,000 steps a day for more than 200 days straight.
“Each of my doctors said, if I wasn’t in the shape that I was in, this might’ve been a different outcome,” Al said.
