Comedian Tracy Morgan honored the nurse who helped care for him after his 2014 bus crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, presenting her with the “Tracy Morgan Award for Excellence in Rehabilitation Nursing.”
The 51-year-old gave Gina Domingo, a nurse working in the brain trauma unit at the Hackensack Meridian Health JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute, the award this week after a show at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey.
When presenting the award, Morgan explained why Domingo, who has been taking care of patients for 30 years, is so great at her job.
“She wouldn’t even look at me, she said everything’s gonna be alright,” said the “30 Rock” star, according to local news affiliate ABC7.
“She would take me outside and read and let me be outside in the air. I was so angry, I was so scared.”
Morgan had been in critical condition after his limo bus was hit by a truck and overturned in the six-vehicle crash. Comedy writer James McNair was killed and two others were critically injured.
After the crash, Morgan was in a coma for eight days and woke up blind for several days, having suffered a traumatic brain injury and multiple broken bones. In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2016, Morgan explained how horrible he felt after the crash and what it was like to lose his friend McNair.
“I said, ‘If my funny ever went away, I’d die,’” he told the publication. “And I thought I was going to die for a long time. My thoughts ― I was in a very dark place. I was sitting right here, contemplating suicide. I couldn’t walk.”
He said later in the interview that he still had “shit here to do” and that “it’s gonna take more than 18 wheels for me to get out of here. I have to raise my girl, raise my wife, raise my family.”
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