Last week, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh announced on air that he had recently been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, describing the day as “one of the most difficult” of his life because he had to simultaneously reveal the diagnosis with his staff and his listening audience. While the diagnosis was dire, Rush offered his listeners some reassurance, stating that he has “a deeply personal relationship with God that I do not proselytize about,” which, he said with a laugh, he’s been “working … tremendously” in recent days. On Thursday, Limbaugh said that everything that has happened to him since making the announcement has been a “blessing.”
“You all just continue to stop me dead in my tracks,” Limbaugh told his audience Thursday. “I continue to get emails and flowers and cards. I mean, it’s voluminous. And it is so touching. I mean, people recounting experiences they had 30 years ago, 25 years ago, and this is why I said last Friday, last week, how lucky I am, and people have trouble understanding that.”
“But, believe me, everything that’s happened to me is a blessing,” Rush said. “And I hear things like that, and I don’t know what to do with it.”
Last Friday, Limbaugh addressed what had transpired since his stunning revelation earlier that week, including President Trump honoring him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union address the next day. Revealing the diagnosis, he said, “has been one of the biggest blessings” of his life.
The response to his announcement, he said, has made him finally understand what baseball legend Lou Gehrig meant when he described himself as “the luckiest man on earth” when he first announced that he had ALS.
“Now I know that there was nothing forced or phony or public-relations-related about it because I feel the same way,” said Limbaugh. “I cannot thank all of the people that I have heard from since Monday, and they are still getting a hold of me. There are people I had no idea they knew how to get a hold of me. And the sentiments, the thoughts they’re expressing are just incredibly nice and supportive. And to have this kind of support and to know it, to be fully aware of it, yeah, it does make me one of the luckiest people alive.”
On his show Friday, Rush went on to describe the chain of events that resulted in him being honored by the president in the middle of his State of the Union Tuesday despite having attended his first round of treatment earlier that day.
“So we are where I am to have the first procedure that will set up the beginning of treatment,” Limbaugh explained. “This is Tuesday, and it is scheduled for 5 o’clock in the afternoon. We took no clothes, Kathryn and I. … We went Grub City with shorts, T-shirts. I mean, the whole week’s gonna be in the hospital. There’s no reason to take a coat and tie. There’s no reason to pack a whole bunch of stuff that you’re never gonna use. ‘Light’ was the byword. The procedure was gonna be 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I’d have to show up for it at 12 noon to do the prep, talk to the doctors and so forth. At 9 a.m., the phone rings. I’ve got the number in my address book. So it’s the White House. I answered the phone, and they said, ‘Can you hold for President Trump?’”
Watch Limbaugh give his full account of his SOTU appearance below:
(Part 2/2) pic.twitter.com/nhhQuYBSgU
— Wojciech Pawelczyk 🇵🇱🇺🇸 (@PolishPatriotTM) February 7, 2020
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Transcript via RushLimbaugh.com