helping teach america how to suppress emotion in the face of tragedy has been such a good thing for this country. anchormen aren t the only people who suppress emotion in the face of tragedy now. did you cry when you heard about those college kids getting stabbed and shot by the mass murderer in santa barbara last month? the constant recurrence of public tragic events has coarsened us all. but i ve been shut off from all of that for the last several weeks. i ve been consuming almost no news. it has been 75 days since i put on a neck tie and did my anchorman thing, and a lot has happened to me. beginning with the longest few seconds of my life. it was just after dark fell on saturday night in pirates of the caribbean territory, the virgin islands. i was in a taxi, a big van with three rows of seats. i was in the first row behind the driver, my big brother michael was in the row behind
when the noise of the crash finally stopped, there was a new noise in the van. it was a sound i had never heard before. my big brother in agony. michael instantly and correctly self-diagnosed a broken femur. his thigh bone was broken. it s the biggest bone in the body. it takes tremendous force to break it. it s one of the most painful bone fractures you can get. i thought i was okay. i couldn t see my legs below the knee. they were trapped under the driver s seat. michael asked if i could move my toes. i said i could. and then and only then he told me that meant i wasn t paralyzed. when someone leaned into the taxi and asked how many injured, i said just one. i was wrong. luckily both of the drivers were uninjured. the drunk driver who hit us was saved by an air bag. our taxi driver, a wonderful man, had his livelihood ruined that night but his seat belt allowed him to go home to his wife that night and visit us in the hospital the next day. the little island we were on as
that night but his seat belt allowed him to go home to his wife that night and visit us in the hospital the next day. the little island we were on as a little hospital that can do x-rays but cannot do surgery. the x-rays showed that michael needed surgery for the broken femur, and i needed surgery for a broken hip that didn t really begin to hurt until i was pulled out of the taxi. and then my family went to work. not the o donnells this time. my work family. you know those people who tell you that the company they work for is like family to them? and you don t believe them? how s this for family? a team led by the president of this network, phil griffin, and pat philly crewshell, head of the nbc news group, worked through the night to get me back to new york for surgery and they did exactly the same thing for my brother michael. they didn t have to do that. they sure didn t have to get my brother but they did. that s what family does. at some point in the rest of the