"And a personal voyage through the nightmare that is our health-care system. How a recent surgery taught me what really matters when you go under the knife.

All of this and more tonight. "

BECK: Well, hello America. No matter how much the health-care system would try to keep me down, I`m back. And I`ll have more on that later, on how getting well in this country could actually almost kill you.

BECK: Well, if you have access to the Internet, you`ve probably heard about my recent disappointing experience with our health-care system here in America. If you haven`t, buckle up. It`s going to be a bumpy ride. And trust me, your bottom will hurt at the end of it. It`s my health-care nightmare in tonight`s "Real Story."

The next thing I know, the video is picked up by "The Drudge Report," made it on the front page of AOL.com, and now well over half a million people have seen it.

...

So, if you didn`t listen to the radio show this morning, you still may be wondering exactly what kind of surgery I had. So here it is.

It was butt surgery. I had surgery on my ass. And that`s about it.

So go ahead, make all of the jokes. I mean, I`ll be here all night, so you can continue to make them.

I have seen our system at its very best, and unfortunately I`ve experienced it now at its very worst. You`ll hear some of that at the end of tonight`s broadcast, but in each case, the difference had nothing to do with having the latest equipment or a facility that looked like the Taj Mahal.

It had to do with people and compassion. It had to do with respect. It had to do with people treating people the way those people wanted to be treated themselves.

There were times over the last couple of weeks when I quite honestly was nothing more than a number. I really thought when I got out of the hospital I should get a driver`s license as well, because I felt like I was at a DMV.

There were times when people literally turned their back on my cries of pain and pleas for help. And I believe it was all because we have forgotten that the secret to health care, is contained right there in the word itself, "care."

Somewhere along the way we`ve lost that.

Don`t talk to me about universal health care or HMOs or how much you need a new MRI machine until you can look me in the eye and tell me that you have a staff full of people that have true compassion for their patients. Our politicians are right, we do have a health care crisis in this country, but it`s not going to get fixed by them. It`s not going to get fixed by a politician.

It`s not going to be fixed by the government or attorneys or by insurance companies. It`s certainly not going to be fixed by throwing more money around. After all, at the lowest of my lows, I didn`t care whether that hospital had marble in its bathrooms or plasma TVs up on the wall. The only thing I cared about was finding somebody who actually cared about me.

BECK: Have you heard of the Huntsman Cancer Institute out in Utah?

HERZLINGER: Yes.

BECK: This is an amazing place where you are -- you not only come with a doctor, you come with a scientist as well, and they try to adapt everything specifically for your genetic code. It is a totally different way of looking at health care.

Right now we`re kind of in the cookie cutter, just get them in, get them out, let`s move on. Am I wrong?

BECK: Yes. You know, the scary thing is, is my best friend tried to call me at the hospital and he tried for two days. He couldn`t get through to me because the person who was answering the phone didn`t speak English well enough to understand "Glenn Beck`s room, please," which was phenomenal to me.

With the exception of one person, every person that was a nurse -- and they were phenomenal. The nurses were phenomenal. Every single one of them had an accent from another country. A job that Americans just won`t do is to be a nurse in our society.

BECK: Regina, do you believe that -- have you ever seen the show "House" on Fox?

HERZLINGER: Yes, sure.

BECK: Do you believe that kind of doctor could actually survive?

HERZLINGER: Oh, it`s insane.

BECK: One that has absolutely -- that has no bedside manner at all?

HERZLINGER: Not only that he has no bedside manner, he is funny. But he`s got a staff of three people and he does no work. In a real hospital, he`d be seeing 40 patients a day.

HERZLINGER: All right. Regina, thanks a lot.

The real story is that most Americans don`t understand that pills cannot solve everything. There is a consequence and a tradeoff every time you put something in your body, and that trade off for me nearly got me killed, I believe.

Without drugs, my pain was intolerable, and they put together a cocktail that was phenomenal. With that cocktail, I was having severe trouble breathing, and my mind went places that were darker than I have ever been before. And if you know my past, you know that`s saying something.

So how do we strike the right balance?

Dr. Marc Siegel is the associate professor of medicine for New York University school, author of "False Alarm: The Truth About The Epidemic of Fear."

Doctor, I just want to show you what I was taking. I was on IV morphine, Torinal, Fentanyl patches, Percocet every three hours, and a synthetic morphine drip. Every six minutes I could push for it.

The doctor came in the next day and he said, "You haven`t been pushing for the drip." And I said, "I`m afraid I will die."

It is an amazing situation. We think we can solve everything with medicine, but those same pills can kill us.

Yes. Well, I have to tell you, Doctor, and I want to make this very clear, I was afraid for my life, literally afraid for my life at one point on this medication. But I had the best doctors.

I mean, my doctors were phenomenal. I don`t believe they over-medicated. They agonized over every -- I mean, I heard them talking to each other, I heard them talk to me as a team and saying, Glenn, we take some of these away and your pain -- I mean, I was up on the operation table. It was not a good scene.

But specifically on medication, maybe a better -- a better example would be so many people I know are on Ambien. So many people I know are taking -- you know, we call it Vitamin A here on my floor at CNN because so many people are on Vitamin A because they cannot sleep.

I went to my doctor. I`m down to about two to four hours a night to sleep, and I`m in a cycle where I can`t sleep. And I said to my doctor the first thing, "Do not give me Ambien. Now, how do I sleep?"

That doesn`t occur to so many doctors to say, well, let me teach you how to relax.

BECK: Well, what did you do on your Christmas vacation? As you may have heard, I spent five days in the hospital, and it inspired some of the darkest moments in my life. It is amazing to me how you can go from your highest to your lowest in just a short period of time.

After my surgery went wrong, I was in excruciating pain and the doctors went on working to prescribe a drug cocktail that I believe is usually reserved for Hollywood`s starlets on TMZ.com. I was on Morphine, Percocet, Toridol (ph), some synthetic Morphine derivative on a pump, and my favorite, Fentanyl. It is an end-of-life patch that is literally 80 times more powerful than Morphine.

The combination put me out of pain but in an incredibly dark place. I began hallucinating every time I would close my eyes. I would see horrific images of death.

Every time I would close my eyes, I would see the images of children with their faces being gnawed off by dogs. It was like entering my own movie theater constantly showing the movie "Saw."