David Letterman thanks hospital for the way it treated him

FILE - Talk show host David Letterman attends the Statue of Liberty Museum opening celebration in New York on May 15, 2019. The longtime host of "The Late Show with David Letterman" thanked the staff of the Rhode Island Hospital's emergency department in a video Thursday April 7, 2022. Letterman said that he was treated at the hospital after an injury while visiting Providence with his son last summer. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File) (Evan Agostini, 2019 Invision)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – If David Letterman put together a Top Ten list of hospitals, Rhode Island Hospital would probably be No. 1.

The longtime host of “The Late Show with David Letterman,” who stepped down in 2015, thanked the staff of the hospital's emergency department in a video Thursday in which he disclosed that he was visiting Providence with his son last August when he fell on the sidewalk, struck his head, and fell unconscious.

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“The ambulance comes and picks me up. They take me and my son in the ambulance to the emergency room and they stitch me up, they X-rayed my head, they gave me a CT scan, they scrubbed me up,” Letterman, 74, says in the roughly one-minute long video posted to YouTube by Lifespan, the hospital's parent company.

Someone brushed his teeth and he got some fresh clothes, he said.

He says the experience was scary at the time, but the staff put him at ease.

“So I can’t thank you enough for making time for me,” he concluded. “So I have nothing but lovely things to say and think about with regard to the Rhode Island Hospital and the emergency department.”