Chevy Chase reveals he spent eight days in coma during COVID pandemic
Chevy Chase has revealed that he spent eight days in a coma due to heart failure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The comedy legend has opened up about the health emergency in his new documentary I’m Chevy Chase And You’re Not, which premieres on CNN on Thursday (January 1).
The severity of his hospitalisation had not previously been known, but Chase’ daughter Caley reveals in the doc that her father “basically came back from the dead”(via Billboard).
She recalls the warning the family received from doctors, who told them: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst”. When he finally did regain consciousness, Caley said, “all he could do was use his voice”.
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Chase’s wife Jayni also recounts her memory of the event. “Something was wrong,” she recalls. “And he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we went to ER. His heart stops.”
The star of Saturday Night Live, Caddyshack and National Lampoon’s Vacation was placed in a medically induced coma for a total of eight days and remained in hospital for five weeks, and he has said the trauma has left him with persistent memory gaps.
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Elsewhere in the doc, he reveals that he was hurt by not being invited to the SNL 50th anniversary celebrations earlier this year. “It was kind of upsetting,” he said. “I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors.”
Chase’s reputation for being blunt with his colleagues and co-stars is well established, and last year the director of Saturday Night, the behind-the-scenes drama about the first ever SNL episode, revealed that Chase told him he “should be embarrassed” by the film.
He also described Community, on which he starred for four seasons, as “not funny enough” in 2023, while a year earlier he said he “doesn’t care” about his reputation. “I am who I am,” he said. “And I like where… who I am. I don’t care. And it’s part of me that I don’t care. And I’ve thought about that a lot. And I don’t know what to tell you, man. I just don’t care.”