Derryn Hinch has been blasted for drinking alcohol despite being a liver transplant recipient.
The 74-year-old Victorian senator endured brain trauma and was momentarily unconscious after falling out of an Uber ride on Monday night, following two glasses of wine with dinner in Melbourne.
Sunrise entertainment reporter Peter Ford said the former television and radio personality’s return to alcoholic wine was an insult to the person who had donated his liver to him in 2011.
Derryn Hinch has been blasted for drinking alcohol despite being a liver transplant recipient
Sunrise entertainment reporter Peter Ford said the former television and radio personality’s return to alcoholic wine was an insult to the person who had donated his liver to him in 2011
‘What Derryn now has is not so much a medical problem but a PR problem because people don’t like this sort of story,’ he said.
‘They feel he is somehow cheating the person and the family of the person who died so that you could get their liver.’
Ford likened Hinch’s drinking, after years of being an ambassador for non-alcoholic wine, to a smoking cancer patient.
‘It’s like when you go past the hospital and you see people at the entrance holding on to the drip and a cigarette in the other hand, it’s just a bad look,’ he said.
Hinch, who suffered a serious knee injury after falling off a bike in New Zealand, is due to undergo blood and heart tests at The Alfred Hospital on Thursday, after tripping on a kerb.
‘I had two glasses of wine at dinner – I hadn’t overindulged,’ Senator Hinch said.
Senator Hinch told reporters on Thursday the situation could have been worse if it wasn’t for some quick thinking
Ford likened Hinch’s drinking, after years of being an ambassador for non-alcoholic wine, to a smoking cancer patient during a discussion with Sunrise newsreader Natalie Barr
‘But it’s the obvious question… I don’t blame people for thinking that.’
He told reporters on Thursday the situation could have been worse if it wasn’t for some quick thinking.
‘Thank goodness the Uber driver and a passer-by called an ambulance which was here in four minutes,’ he told said.
‘I was unconscious, knocked out, big lump on the back of my head.’
The senator stopped drinking alcohol in 2011 after drinking six bottles of wine a day destroyed his liver.
He even wrote a book in 2009 called: ‘I Beat the Booze and You Can Too.’
He said a ‘dodgy’ knee injury caused his fall on St Kilda Road on Wednesday night, causing him to ‘come a cropper’.
‘I’m okay but I’m booked in to have some tests. I was hooked up to a heart machine but I’ll have some more tests on my blood pressure,’ he said.
‘It has nothing to do with the liver… to tell you the truth I think I was just tired and I’d been up since early for breakfast TV.’
Mr Hinch, 74, fell out of a car in Melbourne after drinking two glasses of wine at dinner on a night out, the Herald Sun reported
After passersby and the Uber driver called an ambulance, Hinch was diagnosed with ‘minor brain trauma’ from the fall, which had not broken the skin.
The former broadcast journalist, also known as the Human Headline, received a liver transplant in 2011 following the death of his donor Heath Gardner.
In 2008, Hinch said: ‘I don’t drink now, never will again. If I get a titanium liver, I still won’t drink again’.
The Victorian senator flew to Canberra on Wednesday to attend an official event, and said he would be ‘fighting fit’ to return to parliament later in March.