‘He returned from the brink’: Chevy Chase endured eight days in a medically induced coma during the health crisis.
The famed comedian experienced a “near fatal” cardiac event that resulted in him being placed in an medically induced coma during the pandemic, according to a new documentary project about the American actor and comedian.
Featured in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the legend of movies such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who hosted the Oscars twice, was hospitalized for five weeks in the hospital.
“Something was wrong, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we went to the ER. His heart stops. During those years he was drinking, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy; which is when the heart muscles get weaker, and they are unable to pump as much blood out with each beat.”
Doctors then placed him into a state of unconsciousness for over a week, before warning his daughter, his daughter: “His return is uncertain. We don’t know how cognizant he’ll be. Get ready for the worst.”
“Upon waking, all he could do was use his voice,” she continued. “He has practically come back from the dead.”
He himself has revealed that he has suffered recall difficulties since his medical ordeal, and in the documentary he fails to recall some of his past professional and personal disputes, including a physical altercation with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live backstage area.
He expressed he was “upset” by his omission from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL earlier this year, at which he was in attendance but not on stage.
“Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” he said. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I assumed that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When co-stars Garrett Morris and Laraine went on the stage, I was puzzled as to why I wasn't. No one asked me to. Why was I excluded?”
Now 82, Chase, came close to death in 1980 when he was shocked by electricity on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which led to a period of clinical depression.
