Ray Romano, 65, opened up about a scary health issue he recently went through, in a new interview. The actor revealed his doctor told him he was at risk of a “widowmaker” heart attack due to a 90 percent blocked artery in his heart. He ended up undergoing a procedure to prevent it from happening and described the experience as “lucky.”
“I had to have a stent put in,” Ray told Marc Maron on the latest episode of the WTF with Marc Maron podcast. “I got kinda lucky that we found it before having a heart attack.”
Ray also revealed that he’s not on cholesterol medication, but wishes he would have gotten treatment sooner. “If I could go back 20 years, I would have gone on the meds,” he said. The talented star was also diagnosed as a pre-diabetic.
Ray’s latest revelation on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast comes just a couple of weeks after he told ET he first went to see a cardiologist when he started getting chest pains while directing and acting in the film, Somewhere in Queens. “I called my agent at one in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, I go, ‘I can’t do it, can’t do this,'” he told the outlet. “Because — I’m not joking — I had to go to my cardiologist in New York and get on the treadmill and do a stress test because I was getting chest pains.”
As Ray continues to recover from his procedure and feels the gratitude of getting his treatment in time, he’s gearing up for the release of his film, Somewhere in Queens. The feature is set to be released exclusively in theaters on Apr. 21 and stars Ray along with Laurie Metcalf, who plays his character’s wife. The plot of the film is about a married couple who are living “a simple life in Queens, NY, surrounded by their overbearing Italian-American family, when their son finds success on his high school basketball team,” and the husband/dad, played by Ray, “tears the family apart trying to make it happen,” according to IMDB.