Kristen Aguirre is back on the anchor desk after suffering a stroke two years ago.
“For me, this is really a dream job,” Aguirre said after being named weekend evening anchor at WLOS in Asheville, N.C. “I took the last year to really focus on my health and really think about what Kristen wanted to do next. The last two years have been pretty difficult for me.”
While working at KUSA in Denver in April 2019, Aguirre said she took a nap that changed everything.
“I didn’t know what was going on, and I got up, and I had already fell to the ground because my left side was already paralyzed,” she said. “So from what we know, we think my stroke happened during my nap. What caused it, we still have no idea.”
Aguirre had suffered an ischemic stroke that resulted in a traumatic brain injury, leaving the entire left side of her body paralyzed.
A little more than a year later, KUSA let her go. In a video talking about about how she was hurt by the KUSA move, Aguirre expressed doubts about returning to news. In an interview with WLOS, she said she changed her mind after noticing a lack of Latino voices in the news industry.
“I was wondering, where is the Latino voice in all of our coverage?” Aguirre said. “That, for me, was the little spark I needed. ‘Okay, you still have this love for news, we’ve gotta get back out there.'”