Laura's next stop on her journey to health is a hospital room. Dr. Oz introduces Laura to Hugh, another one of his patients. "I want you to understand him because he's basically you," Dr. Oz says. "In the next hour, I will open up his chest and do a triple bypass."
Like Laura, Hugh struggled with smoking, had an unhealthy diet and lived a life of stress. Hugh has some advice for Laura. "Stop the smoking, lose some weight, exercise," he says. "Get yourself together."
A tearful Laura holds his hand before surgery. "I'm more worried about him than I am me right now," she says. Dr. Oz says Hugh made it through the surgery without any problems and went home quickly.
Dr. Oz says he was struck by how empathetic Laura was to Hugh. "You've often absorbed a lot of the pain from the people you meet, and [Hugh] is a good example. You actually seemed more in pain by the prospect of the surgery than he did," Dr. Oz says. "It caught me off guard. I didn't expect that. I thought you'd be fearful because you'd take it as a threat, and you immediately adopted him. She took him into the operating room."
Still, Dr. Oz says Laura needs to be proactive about her own stress levels. "Stress may be the biggest obstacle of all," he says. "And it's remarkable how you use humor so beautifully, because you are so darned funny. But you use it like a thin coat of varnish over a big crack in the wall. It just hides the deeper issues in your life."
