Chad Michael Murray didn’t hold anything back when he showed up on the Great Company podcast. He opened up about a terrifying health crisis that blindsided him when he was just 15.
Out of nowhere, his intestines twisted up—a total nightmare—leading to massive internal bleeding.
Chad Michael Murray: I was on my deathbed
“I was hospitalised for two and a half months. It was a lot,” Murray, now 43, said. He described slipping in and out of consciousness, totally at the mercy of whatever was happening to his body.
“We had surgery. I had internal bleeding, I lost 50% of my blood. I was on my deathbed,” he admitted. It got so dire that his family called in a priest for last rites.
“I just remember seeing my father, the weakest I’d ever seen him, and a priest at the end of my bed. They’re talking about last rites and all that stuff, and [the nurse, Sandy] gave me a blood transfusion to save my life,” Murray recalled. “It saved my life.”
What exactly happened with Chad Michael Murray?
Chad Michael Murray never did say exactly what caused the whole thing, but for context, stuff like volvulus—where your intestine twists around itself—can cause a blockage and a whole mess of problems, according to UCSF.
Murray had to go under the knife again for a second surgery, just to get everything cleaned up inside. “Regardless, you’re in there for two months and, you know, my organs shut down because you have blood all coagulated around them, and they had to wait till everything [healed more]. So, anyway, I had to have a second surgery to clean everything up,” he explained.
Leaving the hospital was its own shock. “I got out. I went from, like, 180 to 118 pounds. I was a skeleton when I got out,” he said. “I remember looking in the mirror the first time going, ‘Who is that?’ Like, I cried. I couldn’t believe that I was looking back at that guy.”
But even in the middle of all that pain, something unexpected happened—one of his nurses, Alana, encouraged him to try modeling. She knew people in the industry, and the encouragement nudged him down the path that eventually led to Hollywood.
How the deadly incident got Chad Michael Murray closer to his dad
That hospital stretch also shifted things for him spiritually and at home. He said it brought him closer to God and to his dad, who was raising five kids solo and never missed a day at the hospital. “My dad [was] raising five kids on his own [and] came to the hospital every single day, and he spent countless nights with me when he had four more kids at home,” Murray recalled.
“The man is tough as nails, and he did that for us. I’m beyond grateful. That’s when our relationship really bonded.”
After coming through all that, Murray changed how he lives. He’s talked before about sticking to clean eating and steering clear of alcohol, a move he credits to that rough chapter when he was a teenager.
Being stuck in a hospital bed, he watched a ton of movies and TV, which only made him more sure that acting was what he wanted to do. That brush with death, brutal as it was, ended up shaping the rest of his life.
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