Issue date: 3/1/07 Section: Features

Media Credit: AP Photo

CHICAGO (AP) - The wife of former ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff said as he faced yet another surgery for brain injuries suffered in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq, she wondered if she would ever have her husband back.

"I didn't care about Bob the anchor. I didn't care about Bob the career person, and the Bob that was being flashed all over the TV. This is my husband, this is my kids' dad," Lee Woodruff said during a broadcast Tuesday of "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

"I just looked at (the doctor) and I said, 'I just want to know, will he still love me?'"

Bob and Lee Woodruff appeared on Winfrey's show to discuss their memoir, "In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing," which went on sale Tuesday.

"It still astounds me that we've been able to get through what we've gotten through so far," said Woodruff, who was injured about a month into his tenure as co-anchor of "World News Tonight."

Winfrey called the book "such an amazing love story."

Woodruff met with reporters in New York on Monday for the first time since being injured 13 months ago. But the appearance on Winfrey's show was the first time his wife talked at length about the ordeal.

She was vacationing at Disney World with the couple's four children when she received the call from ABC News President David Westin that Bob Woodruff had been wounded in Iraq.

"My world just stopped," she said.

But she said she soon realized she had to take on a persona she calls "the general" to be strong for her children.

When she first saw her husband, in a hospital in Germany, he was in a coma and doctors had removed part of his skull because his brain was swollen.

"The left side of his face looked like a monster, it looked like a Frankenstein experiment," she said. "His brain was swollen out of his head like a rugby ball."

Woodruff said the first thing he remembers after emerging from a 5-week-long coma was waking up in the middle of the night and thinking of Lee.

"About 7 o'clock in the morning, she finally comes into the room ... I said, 'Honey, where have you been?'"

While Woodruff quickly progressed from walking to jogging down the hospital's hallways, he had a much greater challenge regaining his cognitive skills.

At first, he did not remember the couple had twin daughters, Lee Woodruff said. He called a respiratory therapist named Peggy, first "Piggy," then "Porky."

He used flashcards to re-learn words. In a family videotape, when handed a mug of coffee, he associated it with caffeine, but labeled it "beer" and then "deer," before coming up with the right word.

Lee Woodruff said one of her greatest strengths was her friend Melanie Bloom, the widow of NBC journalist David Bloom, who died in Iraq in 2003 from an apparent blood clot.

Bloom, who also appeared on the broadcast, said Lee Woodruff never left her side after her husband's death. So the two women flew to Germany together after Bob Woodruff was injured, and on the plane they discussed how everything could play out.

"I'm your worst-case scenario," Bloom said she told her friend. "The worst thing that could happen is that we would lose Bob, and my girls are OK and I'm OK. And so, worst-case scenario _ let's go from there."

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