‘He returned from the brink’: The comedy legend spent eight days in a coma during the pandemic.
Chevy Chase suffered a “life-threatening” cardiac event that caused him being placed in an medically induced coma amid the global health crisis, according to a recent documentary about the entertainment icon.
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 full weeks in the medical facility.
“Something was wrong, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we went to the ER. His heart gave out. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; 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 cautioning his child, his daughter: “We might not get him back. We are unsure how aware he’ll be. You must prepare for the worst.”
“Upon waking, all he could do was use his vocal cords,” she stated further. “He has essentially been resurrected.”
He himself has said that he has dealt with memory problems since his medical ordeal, and in the project he fails to recall some of his past professional and personal disputes, including a physical altercation with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.
He expressed he was “hurt” by his omission from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL this year, at which he was in attendance but not featured.
“Honestly, it was quite upsetting,” he said. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I assumed that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When co-stars Garrett and Laraine Newman were called up, I was wondering as to why I wasn't. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
Now 82, Chase, came close to death in 1980 when he was subjected to an electrical shock on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which led to a period of clinical depression.
