Jan. 6, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
07:57
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I arrived on Saturday back to California with the fetching Mrs. Hewitt. | |
| Yesterday on Sunday I was able to visit Sue and Dennis Prager. | |
| I want to bring you a full update on that. | |
| But I want to begin actually with Dennis's brother, Dr. Kenneth Prager, did a conversation with Marissa Street, who's the CEO of Prager University. | |
| If you haven't been to PragerU, visit Prager, P-R-A-G-E-R-U.com. | |
| PragerU. | |
| You can watch the whole conversation. | |
| But rather than have a layman and a dummy when it comes to medicine like me trying to explain Dennis' injury, I thought we would grab some from the Kenneth Prager interview with Marissa over at PragerU, let you hear from him, and then I'll tell you how it went yesterday. | |
| Here is Dr. Kenneth Prager and Marissa Street. | |
| Cut number. | |
| Obviously, I was shocked, as was the entire family, when I heard about his accident. | |
| So in terms of a spinal cord injury of this nature, I am unfortunately all too familiar with this because my son Joshua had the exact same spinal cord injury, C3, C4, the third and fourth cervical spinal segments. | |
| So I know a lot about spinal cord injury and ironically, Dennis and my father, Max, the last two years of his life had a spinal cord injury. | |
| That was as a result of a medical procedure when he was 94 years old when he had to have an aortic knob replaced and it resulted in a stroke in the spinal cord. | |
| So three close members of my family, immediate family, spinal cord injuries. | |
| When somebody has a spinal cord injury in the area that Dennis has, it affects the nerves. | |
| That go to the diaphragm. | |
| The diaphragm is the major muscle of respiration. | |
| It does most of the work of breathing. | |
| If the diaphragm is weakened as a result of the nerves that go to it being impaired as they would be in a spinal cord injury, your breathing is impaired. | |
| And the fact though that Dennis is making significant progress in getting off the ventilator is a very good sign and very hopeful. | |
| That he will ultimately be entirely liberated from the ventilator and be able to talk and even resume his radio shows at some point. | |
| That is obviously our hope. | |
| His mind is fine. | |
| Having said that, there's also, of course, the problem of movement and the paralysis. | |
| And so right now, Dennis does not move his arms or legs. | |
| That is the whole of it. | |
| Dennis suffered a C3, C4 spinal injury. | |
| Unknown duration. | |
| Don't know how long it's going to go on for. | |
| He's off the ventilator. | |
| I went and spent an hour with him yesterday. | |
| Dennis could have 20 people visiting him at any time, so you've got to kind of work through Sue when you go. | |
| And I spent an hour with him yesterday. | |
| He is as funny as ever, only a different kind of funny because he can't talk yet. | |
| He has talked a little bit and hopes to be back. | |
| He doesn't want any false optimism about when, but he hopes to be back in Q1 sometime on the air. | |
| Dennis, if Dennis can talk, Dennis will be fine. | |
| I've said that from the day I heard about his injury. | |
| And he looked so much better than I expected because I've been getting secondhand reports from Sue, from Alan Estrin, from everyone in the immediate aftermath of his accident six weeks ago. | |
| I didn't know what to expect. | |
| And all it was is Dennis without talking. | |
| And so Dennis in a bed. | |
| And he can't move. | |
| It'll be a while until we figure out the extent of how much movement he has, except his head and his very, very lively face. | |
| Dennis can, as any of those of you who have ever done an event with Dennis. | |
| And I've done hundreds of events with Dennis. | |
| We did our first Ask a Jew event probably a decade ago at Mariner's Church down in Orange County, California. | |
| And I was amazed at how many people liked those events. | |
| And now they've kind of expanded out. | |
| Dennis and I did a half dozen of them. | |
| Now he does them with many people. | |
| Turns out lots of Protestants, Catholics, and every kind of sect you want, Muslims, agnostic, atheists, along with you, come to hear Dennis in the Ask a Jew program. | |
| and I look forward to doing with him again. | |
| I was so pleased. | |
| And a few things, I made notes. | |
| Dennis wanted everyone to know that for years people would ask him, how are you doing? | |
| He'd say, better than my country. | |
| Now he says, well, my country isn't doing better than me because Donald Trump is back and I am on my back. | |
| But he is very, very upbeat about the country. | |
| Of course, he's consuming news 24-7. | |
| He doesn't have a priority for the president-elect. | |
| He thinks a lot of things will have to be done. | |
| He does think Hegseth is going to be confirmed, by the way, rather easily. | |
| He watches a lot of CNN. So that's one of the handful of viewers that they've got last is Dennis Prager. | |
| He doesn't want to convey false optimism. | |
| He does not want certitude about movement to be out there. | |
| He doesn't know. | |
| Nobody knows. | |
| He is, of course, encouraged by the fact that his nephew... | |
| Ken, Dr. Prager's son, had the same injury to the C3, C4 area of his spine and is back walking and is a great journalist now. | |
| But it is a long recovery time. | |
| If Dennis can talk in three months, he'll be doing his broadcasting. | |
| He has been a radio artist for as long as I've been doing it, 30 years. | |
| I told him yesterday we were doing some reminiscing. | |
| I first heard Dennis in 1989. So I moved to California after the Reagan administration, and Dennis Prager was the invited guest of the Lincoln Club in Orange County. | |
| There are many different kinds of Lincoln Club. | |
| The Lincoln Club of Orange County is a powerhouse in California, Buck Johns, Doy Henley. | |
| They invited Dennis Prager, and I had gotten to know Tom Fuentes and Buck Johns and Doy Henley and a bunch of players in Orange County in the 90s, 89, and they had invited me to a Lincoln Club lunch. | |
| And a guy named Dennis Prager shows up and blows me away with erudation, humor, presence, energy. | |
| He's not unlike Trump when it comes to energy. | |
| Dennis just is a huge life force. | |
| And I walked out of there not knowing that my life would be inextricably intertwined with Dennis for many years, but it has been. | |
| He's just a dear friend. | |
| And Dennis likes to always hug me because he knows I just hate being hugged. | |
| I'm not a hugger. | |
| But I walked in yesterday, and I planted a kiss on his head, and he smiled broadly, and we had a chat about that. | |
| Only Dennis would get that from me, and Sue, of course. | |
| And so he could have friends, the most interesting friends in the world, day in and day out there, but he does need his time. | |
| I left after an hour. | |
| The fetching Mrs. Hewitt's rule is 30 minutes to anyone who's sick. | |
| Don't go longer. | |
| They get exhausted. | |
| They don't want to be rude. | |
| And he likes people. | |
| That's all he wants. | |
| When are you coming back? | |
| I said, you tell me, I'll be back. | |
| And I'm just so happy that I can say on the new year, he is every bit the dentist that we all knew. | |
| No listlessness, no, that sometimes recoveries lead people to losing energy. | |
| He has not lost any energy. | |
| His face is so mobile and expressive and he mouths words. | |
| I'm not so good at reading lips. | |
| It takes a while, but he does have a laser, and he can point. | |
| It's just that it's going to take a while, and it was explained to me as a sort of, imagine getting into shape. | |
| You've got to get your diaphragm back into shape. | |
| When you've been on a ventilator, you've got to learn how to breathe again, and you'll learn how to talk again. | |
| You'll be able to do that. | |
| That's going to be great. |
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