Matthew Perry was given 2 per cent chance to live after his colon burst from drug overuse
LOS ANGELES – American actor Matthew Perry, who has been open about his drug addiction over the past decades, has revealed that he almost died four years ago.
In his upcoming memoir Friends, Lovers, And The Big Terrible Thing, out on Nov 1, the 53-year-old star of the hit comedy series Friends (1994 to 2004) wrote candidly about the time his colon burst in 2018 from opioid overuse.
“The doctors told my family that I had a 2 per cent chance to live,” he said in an exclusive interview with People magazine.
“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 added that five people were put on the ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine that night, and he was the only one who survived.
He spent two weeks in a coma and five months in the hospital, and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.
Best known for playing the sarcastic Chandler Bing on all 10 seasons of Friends, Perry’s troubles with addiction to alcohol and pills started when he was first cast in the role.
The dramatic changes in his physical appearance over the course of the decade-long show reflected his sobriety.
At his lowest point, he weighed 128 pounds (58kg) and was popping more than 55 Vicodins a day. He also revealed that he had been to rehabilitation 15 times.
He said that his Friends castmates – Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer – knew about his addiction, and were understanding and patient.
“It’s like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
Perry says he is “pretty healthy now” and determined to help others battling the same demons.
He is just grateful to be alive. “I wanted to share when I was safe from going into the dark side of everything again,” he said. “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.”
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