Former “Friend” Almost Dies During Surgery, Proves Drugs Are Bad Once Again

By now everyone knows about the drug abuse and struggles with addiction for “Friends” alum Mathew Perry. Perry famously has had battles with opioids, alcohol, and just about any drug he could get his hands on during and since the end of Friends in 2004. Fact is, it’s a minor miracle that he is still alive.

Perry never reached the superstar status that he held during his run as Chandler Bing, though he did star in several tepid Hollywood comedies and made the occasional guest spot on television. Now Perry is hawking his memoirs and has related a terrifying story of his drug abuse almost killing him in 2021. Check this out.

Matthew Perry was supposed to have a role in “Don’t Look Up” — but exited the movie’s cast after a medical scare.

The actor was in surgery when his heart stopped for five minutes, according to Rolling Stone’s Tuesday excerpt from his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.”

The “Friends” alum, 53, wrote that while he did film a scene with Jonah Hill as a Republican journalist, he did not return to set. Instead, Perry stayed at a rehab center in Switzerland.

Mathew Perry talks about drug abuse and addiction struggles in his new memoir: “The doctors told my family that I had a 2 percent chance to live” pic.twitter.com/afiPFhb3pC

— TABUSAM TABISH (@sagharsalman1) October 20, 2022

For context, “Don’t Look Up” was a leftist Netflix movie from 2021 with Leo Dicaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. While that should tell you all you need to know about the content and quality, it was also critically praised. Mostly because it skewers conservatives as uneducated, head-in-the-sand rubes denying a comet hurtling towards Earth. To be honest, midway through the Biden administration, I’m becoming very pro-comet. I digress.

Having the medical scare and not having his name attached to that flaming turd of a movie was probably a blessing in disguise, even if lying to get Oxy and having his heart stop for five full minutes was the result.

Perry explained that he was undergoing surgery to have a “weird medical device” put in his back after lying to his doctors about having severe stomach pain in order to get a hydrocodone prescription.

Because the “Odd Couple” alum took the opioid the night before, the hydrocodone combined with the anesthesia drug propofol that was used during the procedure.

Does anyone else see the problem here? Show of hands; who knows what propofol is and that it killed Michael Jackson? Propofol is an extremely powerful sedative, the same one that sent Mike on to Neverland a bit early, and mixing it with opioids is either incredibly stupid, or a suicide attempt. Either way, Perry almost punched out and missed what is undoubtedly going to be another Friends reunion in the future.

Luckily for Perry, the Swedish doctors he was under the care of had seen Thursday night NBC programming and worked for five full minutes to get Mathew back from the Pearly Gates, or wherever he was. It was a close call and taught Perry (again) another lesson about hard drug use.

“I was given the shot at eleven a.m.,” Perry wrote. “I woke up 11 hours later in a different hospital. Apparently, the propofol had stopped my heart. For five minutes.”

“I didn’t flatline — but nothing had been beating,” he recalled. “I was told that some beefy Swiss guy really didn’t want the guy from ‘Friends’ dying on his table and did CPR on me for the full five minutes, beating and pounding my chest.

“If I hadn’t been on ‘Friends,’ would he have stopped at three minutes?” Perry continued. “Did ‘Friends’ save my life again?”

Perry can joke now, but at what point will his luck run out? Hard drug use like that will eventually get you, unless you are Motley Crue or incredibly fortunate. Perry isn’t a rock star, so he should assume his luck will run out eventually without some behavioral changes. For now, let’s hope Chandler has learned his lesson and stays off the drugs, because as we all know, drugs are bad.