‘He was brought back from the edge’: Chevy Chase endured eight days in a coma during the pandemic.
Chevy Chase endured a “near fatal” cardiac event that caused him being placed in an induced coma amid the global health crisis, per details from a recent documentary about the comedy star.
Featured in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the legend of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who hosted the Oscars twice, spent a total of five weeks in the medical facility.
“Something was wrong, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart gave out. 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 through the body with each beat.”
Medical professionals then put him into a state of unconsciousness for more than a week, before advising his daughter, his daughter: “We might not get him back. We are unsure how cognizant he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst.”
“When he woke up, all he was able to do was use his vocal cords,” she stated further. “He has practically come back from the dead.”
He himself has revealed that he has suffered memory problems since his hospitalisation, and in the project he does not recollect some of his past professional and personal incidents, including a physical altercation with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live backstage area.
He expressed he was “disappointed” by his omission from the milestone special of SNL recently, at which he was in attendance but not participating.
“To be frank, it was disappointing,” he said. “I'm only now voicing this. But I expected that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When former castmates Garrett Morris and Laraine went on the stage, I was curious as to why I wasn't. No one asked me to. Why was I overlooked?”
The 82-year-old, nearly lost his life in 1980 when he was shocked by electricity on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which triggered a period of clinical depression.
