Longtime CNN reporter Richard Roth is recovering after receiving a kidney transplant thanks to a colleague at the network.
Roth, CNN’s last remaining original employee, sent a letter to the entire organization in September noting that he was in need of a kidney.
The emailed message was mentioned by former network President Jeff Zucker during a daily editorial call, which Samira Jafari, deputy managing editor of CNN’s investigations unit, said sparked her decision to answer Roth’s request.
“I was moved by it,” Jafari said during a joint appearance with Roth on CNN’s “New Day” on Monday.
“I’m just very blessed. I’m not very lucky at the race track, one of my loves, but so far with this medical lifeline that Samira has given me, it’s onward and upward,” Roth said during the interview.
Jafari said the surgery was “much easier” on her body than on Roth’s and said she was “continuously rooting for him” as he recovers.
Jafari, who is based in Atlanta, said she had never met Roth in person but had “a great admiration for what he did” and his status in the company as its longest-serving journalist.
“It just felt like as a human something I could do at that point in my life,” she said.
The network reported that Roth sent a note on Friday to his colleagues across the network asking how “you thank someone who gets you off dialysis and saves your life” while calling Jafari his “heroine.”