UPDATE 3/14/2019 7:30 EST: She’s back!
Whoopi Goldberg surprised the audience at The View on Thursday with her unannounced return — but no one was more surprised than her cohosts, who legit had NO IDEA she was backstage!
Watch as she gives them all a beautiful shock and gets a well-deserved standing ovation from the crowd and tears from her girls!
And in addition to a health update, she also has a health COMPLAINT. Watch her explain just how sick she was AND how insurance didn’t want to cover the cost for proper medical treatment.
You may have noticed you haven’t seen Whoopi Goldberg in a minute.
Not only has she not been on The View since February 6, she hasn’t posted on Instagram since February 11.
Photo: Whoopi’s Mother Is Her Identical Twin
No, she hasn’t been on vacay all this time. Unfortunately she’s been sick — and it turns out it’s far more serious than anyone realized!
Thankfully she’s doing better now, enough so she was up to filming a little health update for Friday’s episode of The View .
She opened up by saying:
“Hey, yes, it’s me. 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. 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.”
Eesh!
For those who don’t know, sepsis is a condition where the body essentially fights an infection incorrectly — leading to all sorts of damage to the body. If it’s bad enough, it can even be life-threatening.
For Whoopi, it was pretty bad. She revealed:
“Yes, I came very, very close to leaving the earth.”
Wow.
The idea of losing Whoopi Goldberg… we honestly can’t even handle thinking about that right now. And thank goodness we don’t have to! She continued:
“Good news, I didn’t. Thank you for all of your good wishes, all of the wonderful things that people have been saying. Even people who are not, like, huge fans of mine have actually been saying nice things about me. We all know that’s gonna change when I get back, but for right now it’s brilliant. And thank you for everything.”
Ha! Same old Whoopi. That’s what we like to see!
She concluded by speaking directly to the table, saying:
“Ladies, I cannot wait to see y’all. This has been interesting and I’ll tell you about it when we’re all at the table. To everybody, see you soon.”
See the entire vid and sweet introduction from Joy Behar (below)!
Whew! Look, we’re just going to come out and say it:
The View needs Whoopi back.
Without Guinan guiding them with her calming presence, the table has gotten more combative, culminating in a very public, on-camera fight between Joy and Meghan McCain.
We know where some people would place that blame — Queer Eye star Bobby Berk called out conservative Meghan just this week for her Trump-like tactics of repeating incorrect information and constantly playing the victim card whenever anyone disagreed with her.
But it seems to us this is far less a problem when Whoopi is there to keep everyone chill.
What do YOU think, Perezcious view-ers??
[Image via The View/YouTube.]