‘He returned from the brink’: Chevy Chase endured eight days in a medically induced coma during the health crisis.
The famed comedian endured a “potentially fatal” heart failure that caused him being put into an medically induced coma during the pandemic, as revealed in a new film about the entertainment icon.
Featured in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who hosted the Oscars twice, was hospitalized for five weeks in the medical facility.
“He wasn't right, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we headed to the ER. His heart stopped. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; which is when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood through the body with each beat.”
Physicians subsequently induced him into a state of unconsciousness for eight days, before warning his child, Caley: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. You must prepare for the worst.”
“After regaining consciousness, all he was able to do was use his voice,” she continued. “He has essentially been resurrected.”
Chase himself has stated that he has experienced cognitive issues since his medical ordeal, and in the film he fails to recall some of his past professional and personal incidents, including a fistfight with fellow comedian Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live green room.
Chase said he was “disappointed” by his absence from the 50th anniversary special of SNL earlier this year, at which he was in the audience 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 expected that I should have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When former castmates Garrett Morris and Laraine Newman went on the stage, I was puzzled as to why I didn’t. I wasn't invited. Why was I overlooked?”
The 82-year-old, came close to death in 1980 when he was electrocuted on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which precipitated a period of severe depression.