That’s gotta hurt. Meredith Vieira wasn’t trying to be cool when she started the fourth hour of Friday’s Today show still wearing her sunglasses. As she revealed to co-host Hoda Kotb (and Today‘s many viewers), she was using them to cover up a pretty painful-looking black eye.
“If you’re going to laugh, I’m not going to tell you [what happened],” she told Kotb on Aug. 14 before launching into the story.
“I went to the bathroom,” she began. “I had to go to the bathroom and I didn’t put the light on. And to get to the bathroom, you go through a little dressing room. And I had just come back from Los Angeles…and the suitcase is black, and the room is black — it’s dark.”
Vieira explained that while she wasn’t “exhausted,” per se, it was the middle of the night. “And so I go to the bathroom, and I forget the suitcase is there. And I fell over the suitcase, and I hit my head on the rim of the dressing room table,” she shared.
The journalist’s husband, Richard M. Cohen, offered his own version of events on his blog, which Kotb read from during Friday’s show.
“I am the one in my house who has multiple sclerosis,” he wrote. “I am the only one who is legally blind. I have limited depth perception and glance off doorways if I am not careful — and I am very cautious — because my lateral perception also is deficient. Yet I survive because I have learned self–preservation. I am married to a woman who has not.”
He went on to joke about his wife’s clumsiness. “Meredith is a klutz, like a drunken sailor on a bender who collides with stationary objects and is a danger to herself,” he quipped. Of her fall, he added, “The dog was so embarrassed for her he did not even bark.”
Vieira’s doctor, on the other hand, was “concerned about a possible concussion” and requested a CT scan. “What did they see? I asked. A brain, by any chance?” Cohen cracked.
All joking aside, the View alum said she’s lucky that she walked away with just a black eye. “If it had been a little lower, something bad could have happened. Something really bad,” she admitted. “My head hurts.”
