Friends star Matthew Perry says he is lucky to be alive after he put on life support and was given “2 per cent chance to live” at the height of his battle with opioid and alcohol addiction.
Perry, 53, detailed his struggles in a candid interview with People magazine, recounting how he spent months in hospital in 2018.
His publicist at the time said he was recovering from surgery on a gastrointestinal perforation. However, Perry reveals in a new memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, he was actually fighting for his life after his colon burst due to opioid abuse.
Perry, then 49, was in a coma for two weeks and on life support, spending a total of five months in hospital.
“The doctors told my family that I had a 2 per cent chance to live,” Perry told People on Thursday (Australian time).
“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.
“There were five people put on an ECMO machine that night and the other four died and I survived. So the big question is why? Why was I the one? There has to be some kind of reason.”
Perry, famous for his portrayal of Chandler Bing on the hit TV series, revealed he had done 15 stints in rehab, has had 14 surgeries on his stomach, and had to use a colostomy bag for nine months.
He added that at the worst of his addictions he was taking 55 Vicodin a day and weighed roughly 58 kilograms.
“I didn’t know how to stop,” Perry told People.
“If the police came over to my house and said, ‘If you drink tonight, we’re going to take you to jail’, I’d start packing. I couldn’t stop because the disease and the addiction is progressive. So it gets worse and worse as you grow older.”
The actor said his alcohol addiction began around the time he joined the cast of Friends at age 24.
By the time he was 34, he said, he was “really entrenched in a lot of trouble.”
Perry said his Friends castmates – Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer – were protective of him as he battled addiction.
“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,” he said.
“They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own. That’s kind of what the cast did for me.”
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is available on November 1.
