The sudden demise of Matthew Perry has left the world in shock. The F.R.I.E.N.D.S actor was found dead in a hot tub at his residence in Los Angeles on Saturday, as per reports.
While his fans haven’t been able to wrap their heads around the fact that their beloved Chandler Bing is no more, did you know that the actor had come close to death once before when he was 49?
Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing has references of him getting hospitalised for five months after his colon got ruptured due to opioid overuse. In conversation with People, he shared that the doctors told his family that there was only two per cent chance of him living.
“The doctors told my family that I had a two per cent chance to live. That’s the time I really came close to my life ending.”
“I was put on a thing called an ECMO machine, which does all the breathing for your heart and your lungs. And that’s called a Hail Mary. No one survives that,” he told the publication.
In fact, Perry’s heart had reportedly stopped beating for about five minutes during the surgery. “It wasn’t a heart attack — I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating,” the actor had said.
He even went into a coma for two weeks and woke up with a colostomy bag that he had to use for the next one year.
Perry has always been quite transparent about his drug and alcohol addiction in the past. While the actor started drinking at the age of 14, he wrote his memoir only after he felt he was “safe from going into the dark side of everything again,” he told People.
“Acting was another one of my drugs…And it didn’t do the damage that alcohol was already starting to do. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to wake up after a night of drinking,” Perry had written in Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
(Published 29 October 2023, 06:23 IST)