UPDATE: Nick Cordero had a successful tracheostomy that will help him ease away from mechanical ventilation.
His wife, Amanda Kloots, updated the actors condition on her Instagram. Cordero has been battling severe health complications related to COVID-19, and almost lost a leg. He has been hospitalized for a month.
The news was much better in the latest update.
“He is on the trach, They did it! And he’s okay and he’s free of the ventilator, thank God. We have been trying to do this for Nick for so many weeks now, and it just kept getting stalled and pushed back because of his health.
“And now, he was finally healthy enough today to get the trach and the ventilator is out,’ she said. ‘His face is clear of all of those tubes. This is just amazing news guys because we really needed this to happen to get him off that ventilator, this is a lot more comfortable for Nick. I think he’ll be feeling better, even subconsciously feeling better. I think this is a great sign for some good recovery days ahead and for him to be able to wake up and have that pressure relieved from his throat. Trach is in, woohoo.”
EARLIER: Just days after Broadway actor Nick Cordero seemed to be on the mend, his wife Amanda Kloots posted a heartbreaking Instagram update.
On her Instagram stories Kloots, with whom Cordero has a 10-month-old son, said that while Cordero’s CT scans showed he was “clear of internal bleeding,” his lungs had become “severely damaged” and “look almost like he’s been a smoker for 50 years.”
“They’re that damaged,” she went on. “There are holes in his lungs where obviously you don’t want holes to be. So this kind of was found because his oxygen count went down and so they kind of went down and deep into the lungs…It wasn’t as bad as the couple of days before, but they had to clean out his lungs again.”
Kloots said that doctors will soon perform a different scan of Cordero’s lungs to “get a better picture of what’s going on.” They want to “find out from this culture what the fungus is so that they can specifically give the right medication to attack that fungus.”
All this comes after Kloots said this weekend that Cordero was likely in recovery after two negative coronavirus tests.
Previously, doctors had amputated Cordero’s right leg as a result of COVID-19-related complications and installed a temporary pacemaker to control his irregular heartbeat.
Cordero, who starred in Broadway’s Waitress and Bullets Over Broadway and on TV in Blue Bloods, has been sedated for several weeks in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Thursday morning, Kloots put on a brave face in an interview with CBS This Morning‘s Gayle King.
Kloots later opened up more in her Instagram story.
“Sometimes when I hear news like I heard yesterday, I’m just like, ‘Really? Like really?’” she said. “It’s almost like we can’t catch a break over here and that is hard to deal with, is very hard to deal with. I have definitely let myself cry. I definitely let myself scream and rage and just be frustrated,”
But she was ultimately hopeful when recalling a conversation with a doctor.
“The doctor that I was speaking to is absolutely wonderful and has the best bedside manner,” Kloots continued. “So the doctor told me that if Nick was in his seventies, we’d be having a different conversation. He’s 41, and he’s been fighting. He’s been fighting really hard. We know he’s literally been thrown every curve ball that he could be thrown.
“He [the doctor] told me that if it was his his brother in there that he would not be giving up hope,” said Kloots. “So I’m not giving up hope. I’m not giving up hope.”