Experiencing pain? Sanjay Gupta explains why 'It Doesn't Have to Hurt'

Terry Gross

September 04, 2025 / 12:49 pm

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta vividly remembers the day he impaled himself on a wrought iron fence. He had just turned 12, and he was running through the neighborhood when he spontaneously decided to vault over a fence that he usually ran around. Except he didn't quite make it.

"One of the spikes caught me on my side and went in the back area of my side and out the front," Gupta says. "It was the skin, thankfully, as opposed to going into the chest or into the abdomen, which would have been much worse, but it was sort of a classic in-out sort of injury."

Gupta says he was impaled for several minutes before his mother arrived to help hoist him off the fence.

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