CNN Newsroom anchor Brooke Baldwin returned to the CNN airwaves this afternoon, 24 days after announcing that she had contracted the novel coronavirus.
“Let me start with a thank you. Thank you for sending me so much love and prayers,” she told viewers at the top of the 1 p.m. hour. ““Hearing from thousands of you, sharing your kindness and generosity with me through texts and emails and a lot of DMs on Instagram was the biggest gift I unexpectedly received these last few weeks, and it showed me how even when the world stops and takes a collective breath, we are all capable of showing up for one another. I am so moved by the millions of you who have been willing to sacrifice so much in the last few weeks all for the safety of your fellow Americans. I know it’s tough, and it still is. When the world reopens for good, let’s remember these more challenging times and remind ourselves we have the power to take care of one another.”
Baldwin’s battle was a difficult one. She wrote a personal essay about her experience for CNN.com, published one week ago today.
“Evenings would bring on an eerie melancholy—Which was particularly odd for me—a glass-half-full/chemically blessed kind of gal,” she wrote.
Baldwin also noted how the illness often brought her to tears. She felt awful, physically and emotionally. “Looking back, my sense of time feels warped and inexact. Some days crawled by tortuously slowly, while others disappeared unaccounted for in my memory, lost in the wash of emotion, sleep, and illness,” Baldwin wrote.
She concluded her essay with the following: “I wouldn’t wish this virus upon anyone, but I hope as my smell and taste and some sense of normalcy start to return, that I will also hold onto the clarity and connection I found while I was so damn sick.”