Drew Carey is looking back on the moment he didn’t realize he was having a heart attack in 2001 — causing him to ignore the symptoms and head straight to work.
The comic, 67, appeared on Ted Danson’s podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name on Wednesday, March 4, and recalled suffering a heart attack while filming The Drew Carey Show.
He explained that he knew he was returning to set in the coming days and decided to start jogging. “I was really overweight,” Carey said, noting he was wearing a heart monitor. As he jogged down the street, his “heart rate went up to something really crazy,” his shoulder “felt numb,” and he experienced “all the things that I read were heart attack symptoms.”
Still, Carey didn’t believe it was a heart attack. “I thought if you had a heart attack, you would go and fall down, like in a cartoon,” he said.
He was so unaware of what was happening that he waited for his heart rate to drop before continuing his jog. Eventually, he headed home and told his then‑girlfriend what happened, calling it the “weirdest thing,” with “all these like heart attack‑like symptoms.”
His girlfriend offered to help, but Carey told Danson he wanted to go to dinner at Bob’s Big Boy. There, he ordered chili spaghetti and iced tea — and agreed to call the doctor in the morning.
The next day, however, was the first day back on set, and Carey didn’t make the call. He got through rehearsal feeling fine, but by the end of the day, something shifted.
“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 struggling to climb the stairs to the trailer, he called a producer and asked them to call an ambulance, saying, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
As he waited, he said goodbye to his friend Sam Simon, who was directing that day, “because I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
At the hospital, Carey stayed for two nights and received a stent in one of his arteries. In 2001, he was also diagnosed with heart disease and underwent an angioplasty, per Parade. Nine years later, he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. At the time, his doctor warned him that without lifestyle changes, his life would be “shorter” and 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 ran his first 10K in nearly 25 years. His health improved so dramatically that he was able to reverse his type 2 diabetes and no longer needs medication.
