Drew Carey has opened up about how he ignored heart attack symptoms in 2001 because of misconceptions he’d picked up from cartoons.
Appearing on the latest episode of Ted Danson‘s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, the The Price is Right host recalled experiencing an increased heart rate and numbness while jogging, which he brushed off because he didn’t clutch his chest and fall down.
“I was really overweight, and we were supposed to come back to taping,” Carey said, per Fox News Digital, referring to his hit sitcom The Drew Carey Show, which aired from 1995 to 2004 on ABC. “So, I had a little chest heart monitor and whatever. And I was jogging down my street, and my heart rate went up to like 160 or something like that, like really crazy, and I was like, ‘Oh.’ And I felt, like, numb in my shoulder.”
Carey told Danson he was experiencing all the usual heart attack symptoms, “but I thought if you had a heart attack, you would go ugh and fall down like in a cartoon. I thought that’s what happened when you had a heart attack.”
Instead, he slowed down, but as soon as he started jogging again, his heart rate would shoot right back up. He said he even passed a deer during his run, which is “supposed to be an omen about something.”
Carey decided not to go to the hospital and later that day went to a restaurant with his girlfriend, where he ate chili spaghetti. “Yeah, after having a heart attack,” he confessed.
The Drew Carey Show; © Warner Bros. / Courtesy: Everett Collection
After promising to call a doctor the next day, Carey returned to taping his sitcom and, after rehearsals, said he “felt okay.” But as soon as the rehearsals finished, he once again experienced a tightness in his chest.
Carey excused himself to go to his trailer and call a doctor. “I went to step up the stairs to my trailer, I really went like, ‘Oh boy, that was rough.’ And I got on the phone to the producer,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, you have to call the ambulance. I think I’m having a heart attack.’”
He also said he called his friend Sam Simon, who co-developed The Simpsons and served as director on The Drew Carey Show.
“So, Sam came over to my trailer, and I go, ‘Hey man, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m on my way to the hospital,’” Carey shared. “I just wanted to make sure I touched him before I went off because I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Carey ended up spending the night in the hospital, where he underwent a coronary angioplasty, which, according to the Mayo Clinic, is “a procedure to open clogged blood vessels of the heart.” This involved having a stent inserted to help keep the artery open and reduce the risk of it narrowing again.
“I left the next day, and I was just like weak as a kitten,” the comedian said, noting how actor Marc Vahanian, who was also a guest on the podcast, was the first to show up at his house and take him on a 30-minute post-heart attack workout.
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