Zach Braff says visiting Nick Cordero in hospital before his death was "f***ing tragic".
The 41-year-old Broadway actor spent more than 90 days in hospital fighting for his life after contracting coronavirus – which is also known as COVID-19 – and eventually lost his battle when he passed away due to complications from the virus on Sunday (05.07.20).
And now, his close friend and fellow actor Zach has explained what happened to Nick whilst in hospital, as he revealed the Broadway star would have need a "full double-lung transplant" to survive.
He said: "Just for clarity’s sake, he didn’t have COVID-19 anymore. What COVID did to Nick is what it does to a lot of people, it comes in and wreaks havoc on your body. Then it leaves and you don’t have it anymore, but you’re left with what the doctors called ‘lungs that look like Swiss cheese.’
"Even to live he would’ve needed a full double-lung transplant and you only get those if you’re healthy in all other ways. So the machines were really truly keeping him alive. His blood pressure wasn’t strong enough so the tips of all his fingers and toes were blackening and they would have had to have been removed had he lived."
Nick was put on dialysis for his kidneys, a ventilator for his lungs, and would have needed a pacemaker fitted in order to keep his heart working.
Zach added: "He just deteriorated, deteriorated, deteriorated, until the point where they put him on the ventilator and then he never came back. He kind of woke up for a little bit and there was some exciting moments where they would say, ‘Nick if you can hear us look up,’ and he would do that, but he wouldn’t do it all the time. It was only occasionally."
The former ‘Scrubs’ star visited Nick in hospital with his girlfriend Florence Pugh, and said watching Nick’s wife Amanda Kloots "sobbing" was heartbreaking, because they were unable to "go hug her" due to the social distancing guidelines put in place because of the pandemic.
Speaking to Donald Faison on their podcast, ‘Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald’, he explained: "[Amanda] was never able to see him fully conscious again. This is how f***ing tragic it was – she would be 10 feet away from us, Florence [Pugh] and I, and sobbing, and we couldn’t go hug her. We would literally stand 10 feet away from her and watch our friend sobbing."