‘He was brought back from the edge’: Chevy Chase was in eight days in a medically induced coma during Covid pandemic.
Chevy Chase suffered a “life-threatening” cardiac event that resulted in him being placed in an medically induced coma in 2021, according to a new film about the entertainment icon.
The film, titled I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of movies such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who emceed the Oscars twice, was hospitalized for five weeks in the hospital.
“There was a problem, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we headed to the ER. His heart stops. During those years he was drinking, he was diagnosed with 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 eight days, before cautioning his child, his daughter: “His return is uncertain. We are unsure 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 returned from the dead.”
He himself has stated that he has experienced recall difficulties since his hospital stay, and in the documentary he does not recollect some of his past professional and personal disputes, including a physical altercation with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.
Chase said he was “upset” by his omission from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL recently, at which he was in the crowd but not featured.
“Honestly, it was quite upsetting,” 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 was not. There was no invitation. Why was I excluded?”
Chase, 82, almost died in 1980 when he was shocked by electricity on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which precipitated a period of clinical depression.
