The LONG Journey BACK

DAYS’s Suzanne Rogers shares the harrowing details of the medical scare that kept her out of Salem for six months.

- Stephanie Sloane

Soap Opera Digest: Welcome back, Suzanne! You were on a long break from the show. Can you tell the story of what happened?

Suzanne Rogers: Well, I will start by saying it wasn’t Covid. It was one of those freaky accidents of swallowing a pill and it not going down. It was last November 18th. I had washed my hair that day and set it in curlers, which I do when I’m going to clean house. I figure that way my hair is set and I’m doing two things at one time. I remembered I hadn’t taken one of my horse pills, so I took the pill and I guess I didn’t drink enough water and I thought, “Gosh, that didn’t go down.” So I drank some more water. Well then it wasn’t going up or down and I got to a point where I thought, “I’m not breathing really well here.” And so panic kind of set in because since my mother passed away, I live by myself, so I was concerned. I managed to get to the phone and I called 911 because I didn’t know what to do and I was choking the words out, and in five minutes they were here. I don’t know why the EMTs didn’t try a Heimlich maneuver but they just put me on a gurney and said, “What hospital?” and put an oxygen thing on my nose and I don’t remember a whole lot beyond that.

Digest: When did you get a sense of what happened?