A new documentary reveals that Chevy Chase suffered heart failure during the pandemic and was in a coma for about eight days. In 2021, it was reported that the comedian, now 82, was hospitalized for five weeks due to an undisclosed heart condition.
“(He) basically came back from the dead. He had heart failure,” Chase’s daughter Kaylee Chase said in the documentary “I’m Chevy Chase, You’re Not,” which aired on CNN on January 1.
“Something is wrong and he couldn’t tell me what’s wrong, so we go to the ER. His heart has stopped,” said Chase’s wife, Jani Chase. “During his years of drinking, he developed cardiomyopathy, which causes the heart muscle to weaken and not be able to pump as much blood with each heartbeat.”
Cardiomyopathy is a chronic disease that can lead to heart failure and other serious symptoms.
“They decided to put him in a coma for probably eight days,” Chase’s longtime friend Peter Aaron revealed. “It’s quite taxing on the body.”
“The doctors warned us, ‘We might not get him back. We don’t know how long he’s going to show up. Prepare for the worst.’ He woke up, and all he could do was make a sound,” Kaley continued, mimicking a confused sound.
When the nurse came in to rearrange the medical equipment, she recognized her father’s same old Chevy Chase. “She said, ‘You have to put this in here.'” And he said, ‘She said so.’ ”
Aaron said it took Chevrolet a while to “turn around” from his coma. He had some kind of “cognitive impairment” and was playing cards and chess to “get his head back together.” (“All I can say is that I am so happy to be back with my family,” Chase said in a statement to the press in 2021. “I’m feeling great. I was in the hospital for five weeks. I had heart problems. So for now, I’m staying at home. I’m not going anywhere.”)
“I think his memory lapses are because of that incident,” Aaron said in the documentary.
Chevrolet agreed. “The doctors said I would lose my memory. That’s what happened here.”
In the doc, when faced with unpleasant moments from his past, including altercations on the set of Saturday Night Live and Community, Chevy said he doesn’t remember many of the events.
“That’s what heart failure is like. I’m fine now,” he said. “It just affects my memory. That’s what the doctors said. So I have to remember things.”
Elsewhere in the documentary, the comedian spoke about being “hurt” by being left out of the “SNL” 50th anniversary special.
“It was actually kind of upsetting,” he said. “This is probably the first time I’ve said this, but I thought I would be on stage along with the other actors. When Garrett (Morris) and Laraine (Newman) got on stage there, I wondered why I didn’t go. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
He added: “I brought it up once in a text message to Lorne (Michaels), but then I retracted it. I said, ‘Okay, I retract it. That’s ridiculous.'” But it’s not that stupid. Someone made a terrible mistake there. I don’t know who it is, but someone made a mistake. They should have put me on that stage. It hurt. ”
