It’s an agonizing choice for anyone to make. Two of the nation’s leading doctors are sharing their professional opinions on taking Luke Perry off life support after he suffered a massive stroke. On an upcoming one-hour special, Dr. Drew Pinsky and Dr. Mehmet Oz weighed in on the family’s decision to do so.
“We know he had a massive stroke where a blood clot went to his brain, or a blood clot formed in his brain,” Oz, 58, said in REELZ’ Luke Perry: In His Own Words documentary. “Now, because you have nothing else you can do to heal the patient, you put them in a medically induced coma to try to allow the brain whatever recovery time it can use. At the end of a few days if it doesn’t show recovery, it means that Luke Perry, when he wasn’t in that ICU bed anymore, he was already in heaven.”
Pinsky, 60, added that he “knew this was a bad situation” when he learned the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star was in a medically induced coma. The former Dr. Drew on Call host explained how it’s an extremely tough call to make for family members, no matter what. He elaborated, “What’s hard for families is when somebody has to come off a ventilator when there’s some possibility of recovery, and you’re trying to make a decision of what kind of recovery would that be, and what kind of life would that be?”
“What did this individual want? Life at any cost? Or would they not want to have lived in a vegetative state? Most people do not want that,” he explained. “But when there’s brain death, that is death. So the decision should be relatively simple, but it’s painful.”
Perry died on March 4 at the age of 52, having never recovered from a “massive” stroke less than a week earlier. Despite the Riverdale actor’s untimely passing, his legacy will live on.
Luke Perry: In His Own Words airs on REELZ Sunday, March 17, at 9 p.m. ET.
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