Alan Ruck.Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty
Alan Ruck is enjoying life these days asone of the stars of the hit showSuccession, but he very nearly didn’t make it past his 45th birthday thanks to a “ferocious” blood infection.
Ruck, now 65, nearly died in 2001 afterhe contracted a mysterious blood infection. At the time, the actor was starring on the ABC sitcomSpin Cityand got sick during a flight to New York with his costar Barry Bostwick.
“They still don’t know how it happened, but I got blood poisoning,” Rucksaid onWTF Podcast with Marc Maron. “I got a streptococcal type g infection in my blood. And all I knew is we were filming like the last show before Christmas and I felt like I was going to die. I just had the worst headache of my life. My whole body hurt. I didn’t know what was going on.”
As he left the airport in a car, Ruck had a fever and chills: “I was a mess.”
“Delirious,“theFerris Bueller’s Day Offstardidn’t realize that the driver had dropped him off at the apartment next door instead of his own.
Alan Ruck, right, on “Spin City”.Bill Foley/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty
Ruck eventually managed to walk over to his building, where his ex-wife, Claudia Stefany, also assumed that he was drunk.
“I just collapsed and she called 911,” he said. “The next thing I know, I hear — that was like three days before Christmas — the next thing I know, people are going, ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Happy New Year!’ "
Ruck “was out for like nine days” in the hospital, and lost 35 lbs.
“My kidneys had stopped working,” he said. “I got this ferocious infection in my bloodstream.”
Doctors were unsureif Ruck was going to surviveafter his kidneys shut down and the infection “shot little pieces of crap up into my brain,” but amazingly, he pulled through.
“My liver, for like a minute, was like, ‘Is the liver going to go?’ because it would’ve been curtains. So, for two days, they were like, ‘He’s not going to make it’ and then, after two days, I was hanging in there and they were like, ‘OK, it looks like he’s going to pull through, but he’s not going to be right upstairs.’ And then I started to regain some clarity and I wasn’t any dumber than I was before when I got sick.”
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Ruck’s doctors also thought that he may need to be on dialysis for the rest of his life to keep his kidneys going, but they fully recovered.
“I’m lucky. I don’t know why,” he said. “To this day they don’t know how I got it.”
source: people.com
