As part of his long journey from addiction, beloved actor/comedian Matthew Perry has revealed that he was nearly a dead man about four years ago before he had a miraculous recovery from a gruesome illness.
Perry 53, a.k.a. Chandler Bing from the hit NBC sitcom “Friends,” is promoting an about-to-be-published life story called “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,” available starting on November 1.
“Perry opens his memoir with the revelation that he almost died a few years ago at age 49,” People magazine reported on Wednesday in an exclusive. “Publicly acknowledging at the time that he suffered from a gastrointestinal perforation, the actor had actually spent weeks fighting for his life after his colon burst from opioid overuse. He spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.”
Everyone loves a comeback story, and Perry is a lucky guy, the same excerpt implied, and he has acknowledged that he is grateful to be alive after the near-death encounter.
“When he was first admitted to the hospital, ‘the doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live,’ he recalls. ‘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.”
Perry explained that four other people that same night in the hospital who were placed on the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine all passed away, which apparently, in part, provided the motivation to put his thoughts and experiences in a book to help others suffering from substance abuse.
In advance of a book tour, Perry took to Instagram to tell his fans that his book is “really personal” and reflects an effort that he poured his whole heart into. The post has received nearly 450,000 likes so far.
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Similarly, he told People that “I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again. I had to wait until I was pretty safely sober — and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction — to write it all down. And the main thing was, I was pretty certain that it would help people.”
“At one terrifying point during his Friends reign, Perry was taking 55 Vicodin a day and was down to 128 pounds,” People recalled.
Perry apparently may have had some issues during the “Friends” reunion in 2021, or at least in the video promo for it.
Recent paparazzi photos of Perry, who has undergone 14 stomach surgeries and gone into rehab 15 times but is now fortunately sober, have depicted a man who appears overweight and kind of sickly looking, although he now describes himself as “pretty healthy.”
In general, what celebrities say, and what they do, can often be quite disparate.
In this particular instance, it appears that Matthew Perry has turned the corner, however, and no one wishes him anything other than the very best.
Perry reportedly began struggling with alcohol at age 24 when he first got the gig on the NBC show, and within 10 years, “I was really entrenched in a lot of trouble.”
‘Friends’ creator laments use of wrong pronouns for Chandler’s trans father in marathon white-guilt trip https://t.co/ddYWnMcErQ pic.twitter.com/TVHStYm3IJ
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He told the entertainment outlet about a key revelation in his recovery: “His impetus to stop taking drugs? ‘My therapist said, ‘The next time you think about taking Oxycontin, just think about having a colostomy bag for the rest of your life.’ And a little window opened and I crawled through it and I no longer want Oxycontin anymore.”
According to Fox News, “Perry turned to alcohol and drugs, as he relied on Vicodin after a jet ski accident in ’97…”
With a famous ensemble cast, “Friends” ran from 1994 to 2004, and has subsequently made a fortune in syndication and streaming.
Watch a report on the book aired by the Today show:
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Robert Jonathan is a staff writer for BizPac Review. He is a longtime writer/editor for news aggregation websites and has also developed content in the legal and financial publishing sectors as well as for online education. He earned a Juris Doctorate from the University of Connecticut School of Law, “a law school the basketball teams can be proud of.”
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