Actor Ray Romano has said he is “lucky” to be alive following a discovery about his health by doctors.
Romano, 65, who starred in Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996-2005 as well as films including Ice Age, The Big Sick and The Irishman, spoke about his health scare in a new interview on WTF with Marc Maron.
Romano spoke about how he’d suffered for years with high cholesterol – something that led to a 90 per cent blockage in his main artery.
He said: “I had high cholesterol 20 years ago and my guy always told me, ‘Why don’t we start going on the statin?’ Every time, I said, ‘Let me do it myself.’”
Romano said he would go home and try to eat healthier to reverse the cholesterol himself, but admitted that it wasn’t successful – a pattern that lasted for 16 years.
He said he “would go home and eat a little healthier and get it down a couple ticks”, but then his doctor would say: “It was 280 and now its 220 – you gotta get it down even more.”
“But I’d go home and think I was hot shit – that was the cycle,” he continued.
The actor said that he had to “have a stent put in” because he had “90 per cent blockage” in the artery deemed “the widow-maker”.
“I got kind of lucky that we found it,” he continued, saying that he “would have gone on the meds” sooner had he realised how serious it was.
Talking about getting older, he said: “Saying 50 was weird, but saying 60 sounds foreign, it sounds fake. In my head I don’t feel that old. In my body I’m getting a couple of notices that I am that old.”
Romano is currently starring in comedy movie Somewhere in Queens, which he also directed.