“There was a time with my left leg when my doctors said, ‘It will bear weight,’ and I thought, ‘You know, I’m the owner of this leg. Yeah, right. It’ll never bear weight.’ They were right and I was wrong,” Kirk said Tuesday in a sit-down interview in Washington…

Kirk needed three brain surgeries to help him heal. At one point he was so close to death he recalled angels speaking to him.

“I felt like there were three angels in the room. And, interestingly, they had New York accents, probably because the last movie I’d seen was on Channel 11, was the original ‘Ocean’s 11,'” he said.