A final note from NewsHour's Jim Lehrer on Thursday's broadcast:

Before we go tonight, a few personal words, if I may. Mostly, there are just two words: Thank you. Thank you for the messages of concern and encouragement the last two months. I wanted to respond personally to each, but there were just too many, thousands of them, and still counting. I read every one of them. They mattered very much to me. There is no mystery about what happened. The aortic valve in my heart went bad and it was replaced, skillfully and perfectly. I will be easing back to work a couple or so days a week at a time, so please don't think anything's gone wrong again when I turn up missing. For the record, one of my doctors said a valve procedure like mine is known to make a person feel and act 10 years younger, so stay tuned.