Savannah Guthrie Returns to ‘Today’ After Recovery From Serious Eye Injury and Surgery

Savannah Guthrie is back on the mend and back on the Today show after a serious eye injury had her out of commission for a whole month. Monday, Guthrie returned to her place beside co-host Hoda Kotb, gushing over just how good it was to be back on the show after undergoing extensive surgery to repair a torn retina caused when 3-year-old son Charley hit her in the face with a toy train.

“When I say ‘Good to see you,’ I really mean it,” Guthrie said upon her return, with Kotb responding, “I gotta tell you, it feels so good to have you sitting right here.”

After Guthrie’s painful injury risked the loss of her sight in that eye, doctors initially attempted to repair the tear with less aggressive laser surgery, but ultimately were required to perform a more invasive surgery with a difficult recovery process that kept Guthrie out of the public eye.

“I was kind of wishing I could come in at the end of this week, but the truth is I still can’t see out of that right eye and also it looks a little weird,” she admitted to her co-hosts during a call in last month to update viewers on her progress. “When the surgery was first done I looked like I got punched in the face … it was very swollen.”

“Now it looks pretty normal, but I can’t see,” she added. “The short answer is I think I’m gonna come [back] after the holidays.”

Guthrie’s recovery was “uniquely challenging,” she told PEOPLE prior to her return, as he was required to sit face down for much of the 1-3 weeks after surgery: “Your body starts hurting in different places, lying down like that.”

“The retinal tear had deteriorated sharply, and I lost my vision,” she explained of the dire circumstances. “And that’s what happens if you don’t fix this: You lose your sight.”

“That was the first time I felt freaked out,” she added. “I was hoping that they weren’t going to get in there and see, ‘Oh, it’s worse than we thought. We can’t fix it.’ That was probably the lowest I felt, because I was just really scared.”

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