‘He returned from the brink’: Chevy Chase spent eight days in a coma during Covid pandemic.
Chevy Chase experienced a “near fatal” heart failure that resulted in him being placed in an medically induced coma amid the global health crisis, as revealed in a new documentary project about the entertainment icon.
Featured in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the legend of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who emceed the Oscars on two occasions, spent a total of five full weeks in the hospital.
“He wasn't right, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we headed to the ER. His heart stopped. During those years he was drinking, he developed cardiomyopathy; which is when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood through the body with each beat.”
Medical professionals then put him into a state of unconsciousness for over a week, before warning his daughter, Caley: “We might not get him back. We are unsure how aware he’ll be. You must prepare for the worst.”
“When he woke up, all he could do was use his vocal cords,” she stated further. “He has essentially come back from the dead.”
Chase himself has stated that he has dealt with memory problems since his hospitalisation, and in the film he fails to recall some of his past on-set and backstage disputes, including a physical altercation 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 attendance but not featured.
“Honestly, it was quite upsetting,” he said. “I haven't spoken about this until now. But I assumed that I could 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 was not. There was no invitation. Why was I excluded?”
Chase, 82, 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 severe depression.
