Stephen Colbert Recounts The Health Scare That Sent Him To The Hospital And Thanks His ‘Alien’-Like Burst Appendix

Greg Evans
·3 min read
3

Forget medical textbooks. Stephen Colbert turned to the movies to best illustrate what his recent bout with appendicitis felt like: The chestburster scene from Alien.

A recovered and 14-pound skinnier Colbert was back at his The Late Show desk on CBS last night for the first time since just before Thanksgiving, and he gave viewers a full account of his blood-poisoned pain-filled time off.

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“It’s so lovely to see all of you,” Colbert told his studio audience. “The last time I was sitting at this desk, which was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I was in a heap of trouble. I was not aware of the amount of trouble I was in.” (Band leader Louis Cato interjected here that “for the first time in almost nine years, you had to rehearse the monologue witting at the desk with a barf bucket next to you.”)

Colbert said his problems began shortly after David Letterman appeared as a guest on the show. “I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I might have caught something from Dave’s beard. I woke up the next morning just in abdominal agony, and I figured the pain would go away.”

Despite the pain, he decided to go ahead with the plan to record two episodes that day so the staff could have time off for the Thanksgiving weekend. “How bad could it be?” he says he thought, adding, “turns out, extremely bad.”

“The pain was manageable,” Colbert said. “It only hurt when I moved and when I didn’t. I held it together for two monologues and two-second acts and then a long interview with Bradley Cooper, because there is no pain when you’re lost in those baby blues.”

Colbert continued that the worst was yet to come. “The moment I was not prepared for — and I want to start off by saying I love this man — was the cooking segment I did with José Andrés because at the end of it, he spontaneously grabbed me to dance with him. I don’t want to get too technical here: I was dying.”

To demonstrate his burst appendix, Colbert showed the famous clip from Alien when the creature chews its way out of John Hurt’s torso.

Colbert said that after the tapings were complete, his longtime driver Pablo suggested he proceed directly to the hospital, which Colbert declined, saying he just wanted to get home and sleep. Calmer heads – specifically, wife Evie Colbert – prevailed and Colbert was taken directly to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx.

“They said when they opened me up, it was like they’d shot John Wick 5 down there,” he said. “I don’t want to go into much detail here but basically they go in there with a power washer and a Shop-Vac. They don’t know why appendix goes bad because they don’t know why they go good. They have no idea what it does. All they know is at some point it just turns around to the pancreas and says, ‘I bet I could kill this guy.’”

Colbert ended the segment by thanking hospital staff, show staff and all the famous people who sent well wishes. “They’re too many to name,” he said last night. “You know who you are, and I’ll never forget it. To everyone who did not reach out: I know who you are, and I’ll never forget it.”

Finally, Colbert thanked his burst appendix “because you giving me blood poisoning helped me lose 14 pounds. Ladies, gentlemen, you heard it here first. Appendicitis is the new Ozempic.”

Watch the segment above.

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