‘He was brought back from the edge’: Chevy Chase spent eight days in a medically induced coma during the health crisis.

The famed comedian endured a “life-threatening” cardiac event that caused him being put into an medically induced coma during the pandemic, according to a recent documentary about the entertainment icon.

As documented in 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 full weeks in the hospital.

“Something was wrong, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stops. During those years he was drinking, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy; which is when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood out with each beat.”

Doctors then placed him into a state of unconsciousness for eight days, before advising his child, his daughter: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how aware he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst.”

“When he woke up, all he could do was use his voice,” she added. “He has basically returned from the dead.”

The actor personally has said that he has suffered cognitive issues since his hospitalisation, and in the documentary he cannot remember some of his past professional and personal controversies, including a fight with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.

Chase said he was “hurt” by his omission from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL recently, at which he was in the audience but not participating.

“Honestly, it was quite upsetting,” he said. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I thought that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When former castmates Garrett and Laraine Newman took the stage, I was curious as to why I was not. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”

Chase, 82, nearly lost his life in 1980 when he was shocked by electricity on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which triggered a period of depression.