‘He returned from the brink’: Chevy Chase endured eight days in a medically induced coma during the health crisis.

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

Featured in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who hosted the Oscars on two occasions, was hospitalized for five weeks in the medical facility.

“He wasn't right, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stopped. During those years he was drinking, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy; when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood through the body with each beat.”

Medical professionals then put him into a coma for more than a week, before advising his child, Caley: “He may not recover. We are unsure how cognizant he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst.”

“Upon waking, all he was able to do was use his vocal cords,” she added. “He has basically returned from the dead.”

He himself has revealed that he has dealt with memory problems since his medical ordeal, and in the film he does not recollect some of his past on-set and backstage incidents, including a physical altercation with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.

The comedian noted he was “upset” by his exclusion from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL recently, at which he was in the crowd but not on stage.

“Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” he said. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I assumed that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When co-stars Garrett Morris and Laraine took the stage, I was curious as to why I was not. There was no invitation. Why was I excluded?”

Now 82, Chase, almost died in 1980 when he was subjected to an electrical shock on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which precipitated a period of clinical depression.