‘Today’ Anchor Recovering From Back Surgery

TODAY show anchor Carson Daly has revealed that he is currently recovering from back surgery. During Thursday morning’s show, Daly’s fellow lead anchors spoke with him while he called in virtually from his home. “I feel really good,” the former MTV VJ said, adding that his newest procedure has helped a lot with his chronic back pain. “I just had a really great surgical procedure and I feel great about it, and I’m just… healing.” Fans of the Daly and the Today show can see the complete clip below.

The new surgery comes just months after Daly had a separate procedure that he hoped would help his back pain issues but ultimately did not. The chronic pain he’s been living with stems from an accident he had in 1997. “(I was) totally deteriorating physically,” Carson told his TODAY show co-anchors and fans in a previous email. “For me, I have always believed that surgery would be only a last resort after I exhausted all other forms of pain relief methods and lower back healing techniques,” he added. “Simply put, after 20 years, I tried literally everything.”

The previous noninvasive procedure Daly had, in June, is called Intracept, and it is a method by which a “probe heats up the nerve root in the area that’s causing pain in order to prevent the nerve from sending pain signals to the brain.” Unfortunately, it didn’t work for Daly. “It’s a great option for some, but wasn’t the home run I was desperate for.”

Daly’s newest procedure is called an Anterior Lumbar Interbody Fusion (ALIF), and he had it done at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. According to the University of Southern California Spine Center, the ALIF procedure “is a type of spinal fusion that utilizes an anterior (front – through the abdominal region) approach to fuse (mend) the lumbar spine bones together.” After meeting with Mount Sinai Health System’s chief of spine surgery, Dr. Andrew Hecht, Daly said he felt “1,000%” confident that undergoing ALIF was “the right course of action.”

“I’m hopeful that by removing the degenerative, dark, dehydrated, shrunken disc … and adding spacers and the protein cage to fuse that lower vertebrae section together, it will finally offer me the structure and relief I need to rebuild my physical (ability) and quality of life!” he also said. “And at 49 years old with four young kids raring to go, that’s everything.”