‘He was brought back from the edge’: Chevy Chase was in eight days in a coma during the health crisis.
The famed comedian suffered a “life-threatening” cardiac event that caused him being placed in an induced coma in 2021, per details from a new film about the American actor and comedian.
As documented in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of movies such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who emceed the Oscars on two occasions, remained in care for five weeks in the medical facility.
“He wasn't right, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stopped. 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.”
Physicians subsequently induced him into a coma for more than a week, before warning his daughter, his daughter: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. You must prepare for the worst.”
“Upon waking, all he was able to do was use his voice,” she continued. “He has practically been resurrected.”
He himself has said that he has experienced memory problems since his medical ordeal, and in the documentary he cannot remember some of his past professional and personal incidents, including a fistfight with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live green room.
The comedian noted he was “disappointed” by his absence from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL recently, 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 expected that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When former castmates Garrett and Laraine Newman went on the stage, I was puzzled as to why I didn’t. There was no invitation. Why was I excluded?”
Now 82, Chase, almost died in 1980 when he was subjected to an electrical shock on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which precipitated a period of clinical depression.
