When the role of Michael Corinthos on General Hospital (GH) was once again temporarily recast with Robert Adamson, viewers began to wonder what happened to Chad Duell. Now the actor has revealed the scary hospital stay that kept him off-screen!
The GH star sat down with co-star Maurice Benard on the latter’s Youtube vlog, State of Mind, to explain what really happened to him.
Duell has already been sidelined by the virus which became a global health crisis, so when he began feeling ill, he assumed he had contracted it again. “I had the symptoms of it: the fever, the cough, the headache – a weird headache… I’d never had it like that before.”
When Duell’s tests came back negative, he didn’t panic. “I thought, ‘yeah, the tests are wrong’”, Duell told Benard. “’Maybe it’s a new strain’.” However, things then took a very serious turn for the young actor.
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“On the fourth day, all of a sudden, my chest started hurting unbelievably bad,” he continued. “I felt like I was having a heart attack. Holy crap. It was so painful.”
Still, Duell believed he had caught the same virus that pushed him off-screen months earlier. “’It probably went to my chest’,” the actor recalled thinking. “’I should go to the hospital.’”
An angiogram at the hospital showed that Duell hadn’t suffered a heart attack. Instead, he said he was feeling the effects of “acute myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart muscles”.
So, how is the GH actor feeling now? “OK now, but I thought I was dying,” he added.
Although Duell decided to leave the hospital “against medical advice”, he also shared that the terrifying experience made him reflect on his life.
“When you think you might die, you start to reevaluate some things and see what’s important,” Duell noted. “The worst thing when you’re about to pass is unrealized potential – that and who you love and who loves you.”
Benard also asked him about living alone, alluding to his well-publicized marriage and subsequent break-up (eight weeks later) to The Young and the Restless star Courtney Hope.
“When you go through some kind of radical change, and if you’re used to a certain way of living for six years and it flips on its head,” Duell explained, “there’s two ways you can go with it.”
The actor realized that, “You can try to fill the void and rush something, just to feel better,” but recognized the alternative suits him better.
“It hurts and it’s hard to just sit with yourself and choose to be single,” Duell admitted. “You just try to build yourself into the man or the woman that you really want to be, so that when you’re in a relationship, you’re not having ‘what-ifs’.”
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Ryan Pratt
Ryan is an avid runner, reader, hiker and music collector. When he isn't writing and editing for Fame10 Soaps, he's relishing in the fine company of his two cats, Penny and Gus.