Chad Michael Murray is reflecting on a scary hospital stay when he was a teenager.
“I was 15, and my intestines had twisted,” Murray, 43, said on the Friday, August 8, episode of the “Great Company” podcast. “I was hospitalized for two and a half months. It was a lot.”
He added, “We had surgery. I had internal bleeding, [and] I lost 50 percent of my blood. I was on my deathbed.”
Murray further explained that he doesn’t have many memories of the near-death experience because he was “in and out of consciousness.”
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“I just remember seeing my father, the weakest I’d ever seen him, and a priest at the end of my bed,” the Freakier Friday star recalled. “They’re talking about last rites and all that stuff, and [the nurse] gave me a blood transfusion to save my life. It saved my life.”
Murray added, “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. So, anyway, I had to have a second surgery to clean everything up.”
While Murray was in the hospital, his main nurses, two women named Sandy and Alana, inspired him to pursue a Hollywood career.
“Alana says to me, ‘Oh gosh, you should model,’” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to model. I want to be an actor. Like, I love film and television. I want to give this gift to other people.’ She’s like, ‘Well, you can segue from modeling into acting. Look, when you get out, I’m hooking you up with a modeling company I know.’ And she meant it.”
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Alana was true to her word, and the rest is history for Murray’s career.
“I got out. I went from, like, 180 to 118 pounds. I was a skeleton when I got out,” he said of being discharged from the medical facility. “It was the scariest thing ever. I remember looking in the mirror the first time going, ‘Who is that?” I cried [and] I couldn’t believe that I was looking back at that guy.”
Murray added that navigating the ramifications of a near-fatal health scare at a young age also helped the actor foster important relationships that he still treasures to this day.
“I started my relationship with God, and my relationship with my father became really close,” he said. “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 further gushed, “The man is tough as nails, and he did that for us. I’m overly, like, beyond grateful. That’s when our relationship really bonded.”
