Drew Careyis remembering how he didn't initially realize he was having a heart attack back in 2001, causing him to ignore his symptoms and head to work.
The comic, 67, appeared onTed Danson's podcast,Where Everybody Knows Your Name,on Wednesday, March 4, and recalled how he had a heart attack as he was filming his sitcom,The Drew Carey Show.
He explained that at the time, he knew he was headed back to set in the coming days and decided he wanted to start jogging. "I was really overweight," Carey explained, noting he had a heart monitor on when he was jogging. As he made his way down the street, his "heart rate went up to something really crazy," and his shoulder "felt numb," and he was feeling "all the things that I read were heart attack symptoms."
Still, Carey says he didn't believe he was having a heart attack. "I thought if you had a heart attack, you would go and fall down, like in a cartoon," he said.
Carey shared that he was so unaware of the heart attack he was experiencing that he waited for his heart rate to go down before he continued jogging. Eventually, he decided it was time to head home, and he told his then-girlfriend what happened, again not properly identifying the medical incident, calling it the "weirdest thing," where he had "all these like heart attack-like symptoms."
His girlfriend then offered to help him out, but Carey told Danson that he wanted to go for dinner at Bob's Big Boy. There, he had a plate of chili spaghetti and iced tea and agreed to call the doctor in the morning.
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However, the next day was the first day back to set onThe Drew Carey Show, and Carey didn't call his doctor as he'd planned. He spent the day doing rehearsal and felt okay, but by the end of the day, he went to the writer's room, and that's when things felt off.
"I felt something in my chest again tighten up. I went, 'Oh, I'll be right back. Let me go to my trailer.' " But after he struggled to take the stairs to the trailer, he called a producer and asked them to call for an ambulance, saying, "I think I'm having a heart attack."As he waited for the ambulance, he said bye to his friend, Sam Simon, who was on set directing, "because I didn't know what was going to happen."
Once he made it to the hospital, he was there for two nights and received a stent in one of his arteries.
In 2001, he was also diagnosed with heart disease and had to undergo an angioplasty, perParade. Nine years later, he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. At the time, his doctor warned him that if he didn't change his lifestyle, his life was "going to be shorter" and that he would have "bad things to look forward to,"Carey told PEOPLE in March 2024.
That year, he lost 80 lbs., increased his cardio and, by August 2010, Carey ran his first 10K in nearly 25 years. He also shared that his health improved so much that he was able to reverse his type 2 diabetes and no longer needs medication.
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