The famed comedian endured a “life-threatening” cardiac event that led to him being put into an induced coma during the pandemic, as revealed in a recent documentary 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 hosted the Oscars twice, spent a total of five weeks in the hospital.
“Something was wrong, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stops. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood out with each beat.”
Medical professionals then put him into a coma for more than a week, before advising his child, his daughter: “His return is uncertain. We are unsure how aware he’ll be. You must prepare for the worst.”
“Upon waking, all he could do was use his voice,” she stated further. “He has essentially returned from the dead.”
He himself has stated that he has dealt with memory problems since his hospital stay, and in the documentary he cannot remember some of his past professional and personal disputes, including a fistfight with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.
Chase said he was “hurt” by his exclusion 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. “I'm only now voicing this. But I thought that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When co-stars Garrett and Laraine Newman took the stage, I was puzzled as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
The 82-year-old, nearly lost his life in 1980 when he was electrocuted on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which triggered a period of clinical depression.
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