Whoopi Goldberg Returns to ‘The View’ After Medical Emergency

On Thursday morning, TV personality Whoopi Goldberg returned to her daytime gig on “The View.”

When Joy Behar noted that Whoopi was “still on the mend” from pneumonia, she made a surprise appearance onstage. The 63-year-old was immediately embraced by all the co-hosts as the audience chanted, “Whoopi! Whoopi! Whoopi! Whoopi!”

Behar said the hosts had no idea Whoopi was showing up, adding, “We are shocked, personally.”

While sitting with her colleagues at the table, Whoopi opened up on her health, saying, “This is my first foray out. I am, you know, I am not there yet — I know that.”

“The only way it’s going to get better is if I begin, so this is my beginning… Makeup helps… I still have a cough, and that’s the last thing to go, apparently. But over the next week and a half, I will start to be here more often, but I wanted the first foray to be to come see y’all, because I really kind of miss y’all.”

Whoopi stressed how close she was to dying, saying, “There’s death and here’s me. That’s how it was. This is stuff that, you know, really for everybody, you know, you think you can push through because you got a little cold. You say, ‘I’m gonna just keep going, keep going.’ And you think because you’ve healed quick before that something crazy can’t happen. Well, it can. I had double pneumonia and sepsis.”

“They had to pump a lot of stuff out of me,” she said. “This is a cautionary tale for all of us. You must really take care of yourself because there’s little tiny stuff out there that will kill you that you never think of.”

Whoopi also opened up about her X-rays, sharing, “On the one he looked at, there was a really good-looking lung and really clear like, ‘I’m a lung.’ And then there was, like, this other thing where you should be able to see the diaphragm. It was nothing but white, which meant there was stuff in there.”

She revealed, “The scariest moment was hearing my doctor say to me, ‘You do realize how close to death you were?’ That was, like, ‘Uhhh… no, actually, I hadn’t thought of it.’”

Goldberg was forced to stay home for more than a month due to pneumonia.

Earlier this month, Whoopi revealed that she nearly died. She said, “I am here, I am up and moving around, not as fast as I’d like to be, but I am okay. I’m not dead. So, here’s what happened. I had pneumonia, and I was septic. Pneumonia in both lungs, which meant there was fluid. There was all kinds of stuff going on and, yes, I came very, very close to leaving the Earth.”