Dr. Sanjay Gupta took one for the CNN team. Gupta fell down a flight of stairs Oct. 25 while covering the California wildfires. “I woke up in the morning, after about an hour and a half of sleep. I started at the top of the stairs and, sort of, ended up at the bottom,” Dr. Gupta tells TVNewser.
As he was falling, the neurosurgeon/medical correspondent had the where-with-all to protect his head with his right arm, which meant his left arm was exposed. His left hand hit the floor first, hard. He thought it was just a sprain. “It was in a grotesque position and I was able to put it back in place,” Dr. Gupta describes with medical precision.
Dr. Gupta went to the live location where he reported for the next two hours. By the end of the show his hand “swelled up to the size of a boxing glove.” A trip to the ER in San Diego showed it was a spiral fracture. “Broken and rotated around,” says the TV doctor.
“They put me in a cast” and “with a couple of pain pills,” Gupta flew back to Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital where the renowned neurosurgeon underwent surgery.
About how the injury will affect his day job Dr. Gupta says, “It’s a huge concern of mine and of my surgeons. It’s a bad injury” but “almost always people get complete function back.”
And while he’s out of commission for a few more weeks Dr. Gupta is still making the rounds at Emory. “I’m seeing patients, still going to the hospital, still advising.”
And he’s still in full operating mode at CNN. He’s been working on a special called “Waging War on the VA” about the treatment of wounded soldiers returning from the war zone. A father of two girls, Dr. Gupta has also taken an interest in autism. For the last year he has gotten up to speed on autism research and hopes to use his neuroscience background to bring a new perspective to its potential causes. The autism special airs next week on CNN.
In the meantime, the doctor is the patient. “My physical therapist said I was his best patient,” says Dr. Gupta.