‘He returned from the brink’: The comedy legend spent eight days in a medically induced coma during the health crisis.

The famed comedian endured a “potentially fatal” heart failure that resulted in him being placed in an 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 legend of movies such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who hosted the Oscars twice, remained in care for five full weeks in the hospital.

“Something was wrong, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stopped. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood through the body with each beat.”

Doctors then placed him into a state of unconsciousness for over a week, before warning his daughter, Caley: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. You must prepare 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 stated that he has dealt with memory problems since his hospitalisation, and in the film he cannot remember some of his past on-set and backstage controversies, including a physical altercation with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live backstage area.

He expressed he was “disappointed” by his omission from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL earlier this year, at which he was in the audience 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 expected that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When former castmates Garrett and Laraine took the stage, I was wondering as to why I was not. I wasn't invited. Why was I left aside?”

Chase, 82, almost died in 1980 when he was electrocuted on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which triggered a period of clinical depression.